Features

Open Source Projects to Boost AJAX

By Staff Reporter

IT industry vendors have announced that they would be making it easier for the formation of an open-source community that can popularize Ajax. The supporting members of this project dubbed – Open Ajax – include BEA, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, IBM, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra. The members wish to promote Ajax's compatibility with any computer hardware, application, desktop or operating system, and easy incorporation into new and existing software programs.

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; this is basically to enable quick adoption of Ajax by the developer community. The proposed Eclipse Ajax toolkit framework will support multiple Ajax runtime toolkits. Its personality builder can enable additional toolkits. The runtimes currently supported are from Dojo, OpenRico and Zimbra.

Following in similar lines, San Mateo-based Zimbra, 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.

As the project moves 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.
Ajax is a fast-growing open client technology that businesses are incorporating into their external and internal Web sites to simplify the browsing experience, and make it easier for users to shop, work, plan, correspond and navigate online.

Ajax makes it unnecessary to manually refresh one's browser to send or receive information over the Web. Instead, information is automatically updated and available on demand, allowing you to "drag and drop" or input information and get a response without refreshing the browser, much like you would do on a PC desktop. It can reduce the steps needed to complete a transaction over the Web or create a competitive edge for enterprise companies and Web designers, for example.
Ajax or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML enable web innovations like:

Updating a web page without refreshing the entire screen.
Determining whether the information typed in to an order form is appropriate
Drag and Drop objects inside a Web browser
Buttons, icons, scroll bars, menus and widgets to simplify retrieval of information.

The Ajax community has responded to the Open source initiative in a positive manner. A few industry leaders has this to say:

Kent Dickson, vice president of engineering at BEA Systems says: "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, 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."

"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, 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.

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. 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. "

Ted Farrell, Chief Architect and Vice President of Tools and Middleware for Oracle says: "Ajax substantially enhances the interactivity, performance and usability of browser-based applications, Oracle is 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."


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