Oracle today released Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g, a free set of plug-ins that enable developers to build Java EE and Web Services applications for the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform. It supports development with technologies including Database, Java SE, Java EE, Web Services, XML, and the Spring Framework.

Grails is one of the many web frameworks for the Java platform. However it shines through by its ability to use the best ideas from the Ruby on Rails world while at the same time continuing to leverage the tried, tested and trusted Java platform as well as established frameworks like Spring and Hibernate. With Grails’ tight integration with Java, Groovy based features, growing popularity and improved support from IDEs, Grails looks poised to become the RAD framework of choice for the Java platform.

The EvansData APAC Development Survey 2008, v2 shows that 88% of developers use some dynamic language some of the time and over 40% use one more than half of the time. Javascript is by far the most widely used dynamic language, although 45% of developers in Asia who use dynamic languages now use PHP in some of their projects. Perl is expected to decline and use of Actionscript, the basis for Flash development, will increase.

Sun has announced the release of the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 Prelude, a lightweight Web application server that is based on a modular OSGi architecture. Sun is also providing a preview of features that will be available in the upcoming Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE).

While understanding the popular design patterns is not too difficult, relating them to real applications certainly is. Early on a project lifecycle, developers and architects have to decide on which design patterns to use, decisions that have a major impact on the overall project.

Canoo has released UltraLightClient (ULC) 08, a library to build rich web interfaces for business applications. The new release claims to simplify the development and deployment of web applications.