New Amazon S3 plugin for Grails

Today, Catina Consulting announced the release of an open source Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) plugin for Grails with the following goals:

• Host and manage file assets on Amazon S3 for storage and performance advantages
• Provide easy mechanisms to reference S3-hosted assets in Grails applications
• Make most efficient and cost-effective use of S3 hosting resources

Their first version appears to be rather useful with some excellent capabilities coming in the future. This first version focuses on managing user uploaded static content. Planned features include supporting different media types, custom bucket schemas, security integration, support for both REST and SOAP (currently only uses REST), and reporting on S3 usage.

Installation and configuration seem rather simple so it should be rather easy for Grails users to start immediately using this plugin.

What I think is the most interesting was their ability to reuse the JetS3t Toolkit which is written in Java. This just goes to show how groovy can really be the glue between Java and how developers can reuse all that existing Java code.

Go here to learn more about Amazon S3, which is an online storage web service providing unlimited storage through a simple web service interface (REST or SOAP). S3 aims to provide scalability, high availability, and low latency at cheap costs. It accomplishes this by using the same scalable storage infrastructure that amazon.com uses to run its own global e-commerce network.

For example, Smugmug, a popular photo sharing web site, is using it to store and host pictures. For a simple cost analysis view this post by Jeremey Zawodny who contemplates using S3 to replace his backup server.

And finally, I can't leave the Rails community out of this either so here is an article on using the rails AWS::S3 library (this plugin is more feature complete than the grails plugin).