SAN FRANCISCO—Having received an invitation to join a group of companies working to improve the AJAX development experience, Microsoft is mulling over how it might work with the collaboration of companies known as the OpenAJAX initiative.
In an interview with eWEEK on May 11, Brian Goldfarb, lead product manager for Web Platform and Tools at Microsoft, said the software giant is open to having a dialogue with the group of companies pursuing an open-standards approach to AJAX.
"The idea of open collaboration around AJAX [Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] is a great thing," Goldfarb said. "That's what we're focusing on ourselves—look at the work we've done with Atlas." Atlas is Microsoft's AJAX development framework.
Rod Smith, vice president of Internet technologies at IBM, which started the OpenAJAX effort, told eWEEK at the AJAX Experience conference here that the group extended an invitation to Microsoft based on the work the company has done with Atlas. Smith said the group extended an invitation to Microsoft not only to join the OpenAJAX group, as 13 companies did earlier this week, but also to attend a two-day meeting of the group to be held next week here.
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"OpenAJAX is definitely an interesting development, and any cooperation in the community is always goodness for developers," Goldfarb said. "Microsoft just very recently received an invitation to join OpenAJAX, and we are open to a dialogue about the best way to help developers working with AJAX."
Meanwhile, Microsoft has been represented at the AJAX Experience conference by Brad Abrams, group product manager for the Atlas team. Adams is scheduled to give a talk on Atlas on May 12.
IBM's Smith said he hopes to see Microsoft come to the table on AJAX the way the company did with Web services, where Microsoft and IBM teamed to lead the Web services standards effort.
"We saw this before with XML and Web services." Smith said. "And I applaud the folks coming to the AJAX Summit" next week, he said. "I hope what comes out is the same as what came out of the early Web services meetings," where IBM, Microsoft and others drew up an early blueprint for Web services standards.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Microsoft Mulls OpenAJAX Initiative
