I think the future of Grails will be like this. Plugins will no longer exist! At least most of them will not be needed. Therefore, artifact names will not include the *plugin* prefix or suffix. I agree with the naming proposed by Mattias, but I think the groupId should include some specific categories,
org.apache.grails.async org.apache.grails.cache org.apache.grails.common org.apache.grails.data org.apache.grails.events org.apache.grails.plugins org.apache.grails.gradle org.apache.grails.security org.apache.grails.views The only concern is that 7.x has not reached this stage yet. Plugins are still the mainstream, and there is still a lot of work to do on the core framework (changing the package name). At the same time, backward compatibility needs to be ensured so that some legacy projects can be easily migrated to Apache Grails. I think it is the right time in 8.x version.
