Around JavaOne 06, Oracle made a significant announcement which perhaps because of the hype around Ajax and EJB 3.0, was missed by many Java developers. Oracle announced its plan to support Groovy and Grails and the new JSR-223 specification to enable scripting languages. Groovy is an agile dynamic language for the Java Platform while Grails is an open-source web application framework that uses Groovy to bring Ruby On Rails ideas to the java world.

Although scripting languages have been a topic for discussion for some time now, none of the major Java players had invested much time, money and effort in pushing these languages. With this announcement, Oracle has got behind Groovy and Grails, which are both still in an early stage of development.

It is still anybody’s guess if scripting languages will catch on and maybe even replace the Java language, but with this Oracle announcement, languages like Groovy now have a better chance. Unless the marketing guys get to work very rarely does a technology become mainstream. We have a recent example of SOA, which many believe is an old idea recycled and hyped up.

The reason why Groovy and Grails are expected to do well is because although they introduce many new concepts meant to simplify development, they still stay close to the Java platform and enterprise Java development. While Groovy generates bytecodes that will run on the Java platform, Grails generates a J2EE application that can run on any J2EE server.

– IndicThreads

Tags: Groovy