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IBM-led Vendors start 'Open AJAX'

The team (IBM, BEA Systems, Borland Intl Inc, Novell, Oracle, Google, Mozilla, Openwave Systems, Yahoo, and Red Hat Inc) focuses on encouraging utilization of AJAX

Ajax plays a significant role in developing interactive Web applications. The new Open Ajax, will benefit from IBM's code donation, allowing software developers work with Eclipse when coding AJAX-based Web applications.

Prominent computer industry vendors and Internet-based businesses (IBM, BEA Systems, Borland Intl Inc, Novell, Oracle, Google, Mozilla, Openwave Systems, Yahoo, Red Hat Inc, Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Laszlo Systems, Zend and Zimbra) said they will join efforts to help the open-source community popularize AJAX.

Contributors to this project are IBM, BEA Systems, Borland Intl Inc, Novell, Oracle, Google, Mozilla, Openwave Systems, Yahoo, Red Hat Inc, Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Laszlo Systems, Zend and Zimbra.

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a type of "Rich Internet Application," allowing Web innovations like updating portions of a Web page automatically, checking information submitted (e.g information in order forms), drag-and-dropping objects inside a Web browser, and utilizing a rich set of buttons, icons, scroll bars, menus and widgets for easy web site surfing.

Ajax can be incrementally adopted into existing applications and Web sites, making it cost effective.

To enable rapid adoption of Ajax by the broadest community of software developers, IBM has proposed the contribution of its software to the Eclipse Foundation and Mozilla Corporation that will allow one to develop and debug an Ajax application.

The proposed Eclipse Ajax toolkit framework is the first approach that supports multiple Ajax runtime toolkits. Its personality builder can typically enable additional toolkits in less than an hour.

The runtimes presently supported are from Dojo, OpenRico and Zimbra. Moving forward, other community members will also be able to participate in the proposed Eclipse project with the incorporation of other personality builders or toolkit extensions.

San Mateo-based Zimbra, which has been developing Ajax applications for two years, will make its Ajax runtime toolkit available to the community under Apache and Mozilla public licenses.

The runtime toolkit provides an object-oriented JavaScript class library with a standard set of widgets, an event framework, and communication tools. The resulting applications can be served from virtually any server and run in any browser, including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.

Going forward, this Open Ajax industry initiative will also continue to be well integrated with the Kabuki Ajax Toolkit Project recently accepted for incubation by the Apache Software Foundation.

Other community members are expected to be active in the future. Participation will involve the Dojo Toolkit, an Open Source JavaScript library. It is an Ajax runtime that allows users to build responsive applications using simple and powerful application program interfaces. Applications built on Dojo easily adapt to changing standards and browser capabilities because Dojo is portable between HTML, SVG and other emerging standards.

BEA: "In BEA's AquaLogic User Interaction and WebLogic Portal, we support

Ajax as a technology for building richer Web-based user interfaces that will significantly improve the user experience," said Kent Dickson, vice president of engineering at BEA Systems. "We also believe in the power of open-source, community based creation and evolution of programming frameworks, and expect this effort to accelerate the maturation and adoption of Ajax."

Borland: "Developers are building rich, innovative Web applications using Ajax that can bring exciting benefits for end users," said Rob Cheng, director of developer solutions for Borland. "As a leader in software development solutions, Borland is pleased to collaborate with other industry leaders to advance this technology in an open, broad-based manner."

IBM: "By building a community of innovation around Open Ajax, we are ensuring that the Web remains a place where breakthroughs can occur and where developers can quickly create applications to transform how businesses and people use, interact and access information on the Internet," said Rod Smith, vice president of emerging technologies at IBM.

"This is an important step in IBM's effort -- on behalf of our clients -- to work with a broad coalition of industry leaders to bring open frameworks into computing solutions, and we've already been embracing Ajax and other technologies in our Lotus, Websphere and Rational products to deliver these capabilities to businesses around the world."

Novell: "Novell is a strong proponent of open standards and open source. We're tapping Ajax in the Novell-led open source collaboration project, Hula, to create dynamic user interfaces for end users without the burden of deploying client-side software," said Jeff Jaffe, EVP and CTO at Novell.

"By creating a framework for promoting open collaboration on Ajax, the Open Ajax initiative will foster collective innovation around this important technology and help make the Web an even more productive tool for users worldwide."

Oracle: "Ajax substantially enhances the interactivity, performance and usability of browser-based applications," said Ted Farrell, Chief Architect committed to Ajax technology and many of our products including Oracle JDeveloper 10g R3 utilize Ajax standards. As a result, we are making it easier for developers to reap the benefits of Ajax today and in the next generation of application development."