Oracle to boost AJAX, Java

Oracle will make software contributions intended to boost AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Java programming at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco next week.

Free IT resource Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) May 22-23, 2007 Sponsored by OSBC Free IT resource Virtualization Insights from Top Experts - Learn how virtualization gets real! Sponsored by Dell SPECIAL REPORT More from the 2006 JavaOne Conference

The company will also announce intentions to contribute engineering resources to the open source Grails project.

To bolster AJAX, Oracle will submit its AJAX render kit to the open source community as a follow-up to a previous donation of JavaServer Faces (JSF) components.

"It allows people to work with the JSF components but [they] can display that using AJAX technology, which basically allows them to [have] a much richer environment in the browser," said Ted Farrell, chief architect and vice president of tools and middleware at Oracle.

AJAX is viewed as the answer to building rich Internet applications but developers have had to learn JavaScript and DHTML, Farrell said. "What we've done is abstracted the developer from having to learn JavaScript and DHTML," he said.

Oracle's technology fits in with the vein of Web 2.0, providing for more interactive Web applications, Farrell said.

The company is looking to submit the kit to an open source organization similar to its previous JSF submission to the Apache MyFaces project. The goal is to continue working through MyFaces but the new submissions has not yet been accepted, Farrell said.

The AJAX donation will occur in two months.

Also at JavaOne, Oracle will announce shipment of a reference implementation of the Java Persistence Architecture (JPA), which features persistence APIs for the EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) specification. Developers can use this implementation to code with EJB 3 and perform object-relational mapping between databases and Java objects, Farrell said.

"You can just write Java code to this library and still be able to pull data out of your database into your Java objects," said Farrell. Developers are spared from having to write JDBC code.

Oracle's JPA implementation is derived from the company's TopLink Essentials technology for object-relational mapping. The reference implementation will be downloadable at the Oracle Technology Network Web site on May 16.

Oracle anticipates it can leverage the JPA and AJAX contributions to attract developers to its technology stack, which features an application server and related offerings in areas such as security and data binding.

With Grails, Oracle will assist with this project, which is an open source Web application framework that leverages the Groovy scripting language. Groovy runs natively on a Java Virtual Machine rather than requiring a special C run time environment, according to Oracle. Grails is intended to intended to boost productivity in building simple Web applications.