If you’ve been listening to the Grails Podcast, you’ll know that Sven and I have been cooking up a plan to get some kind of Groovy and Grails “community awards” contest up and running over the next little while. And what better way than via a Grails app!

The plan is inspired by some cool stuff the Ruby community is doing with Ruby Heroes - but we’re giving it a groovy and grails makeover.

Basically, the groovy awards is a place where you can nominate people who are contributing greatly to the community via blogs, mailing list support, articles, plugins, wiki entries, and all that Jazz. This one’s not for the big guns (though Graeme, I am nominating you for the “Grails Programmer most likely to do a James Bond voiceover” award), but rather for the not-so-well-known guys that do awesome stuff in the community.

You can nominate anyone you like, and the names will get passed through a panel of Groovy and Grails luminaries for the final tick. For the winners we’d like to come up with some very cool Groovy and Grails award t-shirts (ideas to follow soon), which we’ll ship out to you with all our love!

Anyways, the app is a work in progress (when lunchtimes permit) but should turn up on google code in the coming weeks… in the meantime let me bamboozle you with my newly acquired InkScape skills.. (Thanks David for the pointer on InkScape - it really is awesome!)

Glen

The neato character is based on a very cool Inkscape tutorial site and is all done in SVG. I’ve never played with SVG before, but I’m loving it. The whole logo is 16k of XML goodness and I’ll stick the SVG in the repo when I commit it. InkScape let’s you do an export as a transparent png, and you’re off and web-apping…

Stay tuned, we still have some details to work out… and if you have any cool tshirt ideas, feel free to add a comment…