The Groovy language and Grails proved a massive success at JavaOne, the world's biggest Java industry conference held in San Francisco. Jeremy Rayner, one of the speakers at the Grails eXchange, has a nice summary of all the positive feedback delivered to Groovy and Groovy in Action, authored by another one of our speakers Dierk Koenig, was number 5 in the book sales at JavaOne!

The Groovy language project has just released version 1.1 beta which features annotations support! In addition version 0.5 of Grails came out yesterday with a whole host of improvements. The Grails project is still on track for a 1.0 release before the first international Grails eXchange 2007!

Skills Matter, the UK's leading provider for Open Source technology training, mentoring, and project based skills transfer, is holding free Grails eXchange Taster sessions featuring some of the speakers at the Grails eXchange.
Catch Dojo's Dylan Schiemann on Dojo 0.9 on May 24th and JBoss's Manik Surtani on JBoss Cached Advanced on June 20th. Attend these seminars and get a chance to win a free Grails eXchange ticket!

Alex Popescu, co-founder of Test NG frameworks and a commiter on the Groovy project, amongst others, will be presenting "Test'N'Groove: a breath of fresh air for your tests". Read more about it here.
Some more great news for the Grails eXchange is that Eugene Vigdorchik of JetBrains will be presenting a session entitled "Groovy with pleasure" that will take you through how to use JetBrains' awesome IDE IntelliJ IDEA with the upcoming Groovy & Grails plug-in!
Get stuck into the Grails Skinning Challenge. Developers are invited to create the best looking and/or most full featured alternative scaffolding skin for Grails using the Grails plug-in system.

1st Place Winner: Ticket to Grails eXchange and an ipod!
2nd Place Winners: Copy of either Groovy in Action by Dierk Koenig (Manning) or The Definitive Guide to Grails (Expert's Voice in Java) by Graeme Rocher (Apress) and ipods!

To enter please send your Skin today! Scott Davis, Editor-in-Chief of AboutGroovy.com, an information portal for all things Groovy and Grails and author of Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java (Pragmatic Bookshelf) and JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide (O'Reilly), has been added to the Grails eXchange line up. He will be speaking on Thursday, October 17th on "Groovy, Grails, and Google Maps: Mashups 101" and "Ajax Development with the Yahoo! UI Library and Grails".

Read about both presentations here

Thomas Burleson, Universal Mind Principal architect for Flex, ColdFusion, and Java/J2EE web technologies, is doing two talks for the Grails eXchange! "Using Groovy-based MVC Code Generator for Web 2.0 Flex Applications" and "Using Groovy to synchronize your Testing code with your Web 2.0 Applications".

Read about both presentations here

Half day Workshop - don't miss this exclusive opportunity to learn the power of Groovy and Grails Presented by Graeme Rocher, the founder of Grails and CTO of Skills Matter, the Open Source Technology training company. This is your opportunity to get up to speed with the features offered by the Groovy language & Grails framework. You will learn how to integrate Grails with existing Java Enterprise services, databases and web applications and how to use a blended approach, mixing static and dynamically typed code to maximise the scalability of your code base. more information and registration