The semiformal effort to set a direction for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML-style development got off to a sound start last week, setting the tone for the group’s goals and establishing a name for itself: the OpenAJAX Alliance.
The group, led by IBM, Zimbra and others, met in San Francisco on May 15 and 16 during the OpenAJAX Summit to establish a road map for how the OpenAJAX Alliance can help broaden the adoption of AJAX.
Coach Wei, chief technology officer at Burlington, Mass.-based Nexaweb Technologies, who attended the OpenAJAX Summit, told eWEEK that more than 20 of the group’s 28 companies participated in the event hosted by Adobe Systems.
The group decided that its official mission is to advance adoption of AJAX technologies, Wei said. To achieve this, he added, the group established three main areas of focus: decrease the risk of AJAX adoption by providing interoperability; ensure that AJAX solutions adhere to open standards and use open-source technology; and preserve the open nature of the Web.
“We decided to keep it informal,” Wei said of the OpenAJAX Alliance. “We’re not going to make it a corporation or a formal organization. We don’t want to become a standards organization or an open-source hosting organization like Eclipse or Apache. But we will work with groups like the W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] for standards and Eclipse and Apache for open-source projects.”
Wei said the group also came to a consensus on the idea of having a complete open-source stack for AJAX—possibly using the Eclipse Foundation’s AJAX Tools Framework, Nexaweb’s XAP (Extensible AJAX platform) or AJAX frameworks such as the Dojo tool kit.
In addition, the OpenAJAX Alliance decided to hold weekly or biweekly conference calls, with the first action being to look at how to improve interoperability among AJAX solutions, Wei said.
In a blog post, Scott Dietzen, president and chief technology officer of Zimbra, said the OpenAJAX Alliance came away with five main themes: “We need to clearly define AJAX; Clarify the mission of OpenAJAX; Endorse and improve AJAX platform technologies; Endorse and improve AJAX design patterns; and Last, but not least, improve the browser.”
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: OpenAJAX Alliance Sets Road Map
