The Groovy community’s been busy rolling out a steady stream of holiday goodness for the Java developers of the world: Groovy 1.5 was just released, Grails 1.0 RC3 is out, and now the Prags are prepping two new Groovy books for early next year. And to top things off, the folks behind NFJS are hosting a three-day conference with Groovy and Grails experts from all over the world.

The inaugural 2G Experience will take place February 21-23 in Reston, VA, and the agenda is slam-packed! BDD with Andy Glover. DSLs with Venkat Subramaniam. Google Maps with Scott Davis. Metaprogramming with Jeff Brown. A can’t-miss JRuby/Groovy smackdown with Neal Ford. A Grails keynote with Graeme Rocher. The list goes on…

I’ll be presenting sessions on Going Further with Grails and Bending GORM: 5-minute Techniques for Enterprise Integration. And to close out the conference, Relevance’s Refactotum series will make its Groovy/Grails debut. I’m teaming up with Scott Davis and Venkat Subramaniam (and any stray Groovy/Grails devs that happen to wander nearby) to host this hands-on workshop helping attendees make their mark on the Groovy and Grails revolution.

Refactotum: Groovy/Grails (3-hour workshop)

Contributing to open source is great for your career. In a few short hours, you can learn, teach, promote your skills, and improve the quality of the community. In this unique workshop, we will show you how, by doing it. Using Grails as an example, we’ll show you how to:

• download the source code
• build and run tests
• use Cobertura and code review to find problem areas
• refactor some code
• create and submit a patch

Take this opportunity to begin contributing to Groovy, Grails, or any other open source project that interests you. Experts from the Groovy and Grails community will be on hand to help you get started.

So is Groovy really “the next generation” of the Java language? Come decide for yourself. As for me, I couldn’t agree more.

The Chinese version of Getting Started with Grails made its debut last week.

In fact, InfoQ has been steadily growing their Chinese Grails portal for quite a while now. There you’ll find updates on the recent Groovy and Grails support in IntelliJ IDEA 7, Guillaume Laforge waxing philosophical on Groovy DSLs, a (familiar) article on using Grails+EJB3, and more.

Add these resources to the Japanese and Korean docs on grails.org, Sven’s upcoming German book on Grails, and undoubtedly several other international resources in the works, and we’re rapidly starting to see a whole new meaning to good i18n support.