OpenAjax Woos Microsoft, Plots 2007 Goals

As the OpenAjax Alliance nears its one-year anniversary, the software developer and vendor consortium is making headway toward its goal of standardizing AJAX technologies -- and it may even lure into the fold the industry's most notorious standards scofflaw, Microsoft.

"They look at this point like they'll probably join," said David Boloker, IBM's CTO for emerging technologies and the chair of OpenAjax's steering committee. "They're going through the legal documents."

A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed that the Redmond, Wash., company is in discussions with OpenAjax about joining the group. Recruiting Microsoft would give OpenAjax an unusually broad membership encompassing several of the industry's fiercest rivals, including Sun Microsystems, IBM and Oracle, along with open-source organizations such as the Eclipse Foundation and Mozilla.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and Extensible Markup Language) is a catchphrase describing the bundle of technologies that a new wave of Web applications use to mimic the look and feel of desktop software. Coined in early 2005 in an essay by Adaptive Path co-founder Jesse James Garrett, AJAX has become a cornerstone of modern Web development. The OpenAjax Alliance launched last February with an amorphous set of goals but a clear philosophy: Its 15 founders pledged to work together to ensure that AJAX evolves as an open, universally compatible technology set.

Since then, the consortium has drafted a road map and begun work toward deliverables in two areas: technical and marketing. A white paper posted in September on OpenAjax's Web site tackled the issue of defining AJAX and detailing some of the specifications and technologies it includes. The group also has formed task forces to study IDE integration, server integration, AJAX security issues and the possibility of a client-side OpenAjax module to mediate client-server communications.

One of the first tech projects OpenAjax will deliver is the OpenAjax Hub, an effort to align disparate, first-generation AJAX libraries. Hosted at SourceForge, the OpenAjax Hub is an open-source project governed by the Apache 2.0 license that OpenAjax has adopted for all of its work.

OpenAjax's Apache choice and intellectual property rights policy are spelled out in the Members Agreement it drafted in May and adopted in October. The agreement has cost OpenAjax a few of its founders, although their disappearance may be temporary. Five of OpenAjax's creators -- Google, Red Hat, BEA Systems, Borland and Yahoo -- aren't currently members of the organization. But for some of those companies, the gap is simply a matter of bureaucratic lag.

"I'm mailing the membership agreement as we speak," said Ed Cobb, BEA's vice president of architecture and standards. Google said it's reviewing the membership agreement and supports OpenAjax's goals, and Borland's new developer tools subsidiary, CodeGear, said it sees OpenAjax as an important AJAX hub and is evaluating its future participation.