Oracle gets Groovy with open-source project

Oracle said it will participate in Grails, an open-source project that seeks to make Java programmers more productive through a close tie-in to the Groovy scripting language.

Grails is a project to create a development framework, a set of prewritten software components designed to speed Web-application creation using Groovy. The name Grails was inspired by Ruby on Rails, a productivity framework for another language called Ruby.

Groovy is a "dynamic," or scripting, language. Dynamic languages are generally designed for speed and simplicity. And unlike other scripting languages, like Python or Ruby, code written with Groovy runs in conjunction with a Java Virtual Machine.

Oracle will have some of its engineers participate in Grails, said Steven G. Harris, vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware. The company is expected to officially announce its backing of Grails at the JavaOne conference next week and is participating so that it can tap the growing interest in scripting languages.

"We've just seen this scripting taking off in the developer community," Harris said.

Groovy is designed so programmers can use Java and Groovy within the same development project.

"You get the benefits like the forgiveness and productivity of a scripting language, but you also get the performance, stability and manageability of the Java infrastructure under the covers," said Harris.

Separately, Oracle next week will be releasing TopLink Essentials, software designed to simplify the job of writing Java programs that query back-end databases.

The Oracle software will comply with the Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 standard and be included with Sun's open-source Java application server, Harris said.