Oracle will donate what he called its next generation AJAX user interface technology to the open source community.

Oracle also announced its plan to support open source scripting communities such as Groovy and Grails and the new JSR-223 specification to enable scripting languages such as Groovy, PHP and Grails to be used in Java Server-side Applications.

Oracle has integrated AJAX technology with Java Server Faces to provide rich, highly interactive user interfaces that run 100 percent within a browser with no downloads, Oracle says. These offerings are part of Oracle's ongoing strategy to simplify next-generation application development by providing developers with advanced tools and flexibility to use development platforms and components of their choice.

In addition to its many contributions to the Apache MyFaces project, Oracle is helping to build support for Java development by becoming the first independent software vendor to allocate resources and to participate in scripting communities like Grails, an open source Web application framework that leverages the Groovy scripting language for Java Web development. Grails is an open-source Java framework that comes with a simplified development environment that significantly increases the productivity of Web application development by eliminating the need to assemble deployment units and enabling developers to begin immediately. The goal of Groovy and Grails -- to attract a new category of developers to the Java platform -- is closely aligned with Oracle's efforts to expand the Java development community.