Grails 1.3 Is Released

I've got some exciting news that I have just read. Grails 1.3 is out. So what's new in Grails 1.3?

• JUnit 4 support
• Maven repository support for Grails plugins
• Declarative plugin dependencies
• Dirty checking in GORM
• Chaining of named criteria
• Application wide Sitemesh layouts

Not all of the new features are exiting for me but I think this is really a good work. I also have something to complain about Grails. Grails is using ant scripts for operations such as creating new projects, controllers, domain classes, etc. As a Django, web2py and Rails developer this is really bothering me. I'm not a Java developer, I don't want to use maven, I don't want to run ant scripts. I suggest Grails developers looking at the Play! framework. They are doing this operations with a Python script.