Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Category: OpenAjax
The OpenAjax Alliance has recently published two new white papers, one on Mobile Ajax and one on recent browser advances.
The first white paper, Introduction to Mobile Ajax for Developers, provides an overview of Ajax application development for mobile devices. The white paper was the collaborative effort among several leading companies in the mobile industry within the OpenAjax Alliance’s Mobile Task Force. The target audience for the white paper is both the Ajax desktop developer who wants to also support mobile phones and the existing mobile developer who is interested in moving towards Ajax for future application development. The white paper characterizes the state of Mobile Ajax today, identifies the key challenges, and highlights the unique opportunities for innovative new applications offered by today’s mobile devices (e.g., telephony, location, camera, SMS). The white paper provides a comprehensive list of developer tips for addessing the challenges and taking advantage of the opportunities.
The second white paper, Good News for Ajax - The Browser Wars Are Back, highlights the major changes in the browser world that are manifesting themselves in this year’s browser releases (i.e., IE8, Firefox3, Safari 3.1, Opera 9.x). The white paper describes how the Open Web, after years of slow advancement, is now adding key features at a rapid rate. The white paper highlights the importance of the new Mobile Web, where desktop Web browser software is appearing on mobile platforms from leading mobile vendors, with shipping products or announcements already from Apple, Google (Android), Microsoft, and Nokia. The long-term result of today’s healthy, fast-paced competition among the browser vendors will be better cross-browser interoperability, improved performance, and major new opportunities to developers for innovation.
Friday, May 30th, 2008
Category: OpenAjax
Jon Ferraiolo of IBM and the OpenAjax Alliance wanted to share with the community news on a couple of initiatives:
The OpenAjax Alliance is requesting industry feedback on two companion initiatives, OpenAjax Conformance and the OpenAjax Registry, which have been under development for the past year.
The term OpenAjax Conformance is shorthand for the set of conformance requirements that OpenAjax Alliance places on Ajax technologies, products, and applications to promote interoperability. Version 1 of OpenAjax Conformance defines 10 specific conformance requirements on Ajax runtime libraries. An Ajax runtime library that meets these conformance requirements will allow Web developers to use that library conveniently within a given Web page with other OpenAjax Conformant libraries.
OpenAjax Conformance provides the following benefits to IT managers and the Ajax developer community:
- Seamless integration of multiple Ajax products and technologies within the same Web application, particularly with applications that use mashup techniques
- Greater certainty about product choices, where OpenAjax Conformance plays a similar role in the Ajax community as the Good Housekeeping Seal does with consumer products
- Lower training costs, lower development costs, and faster delivery of Web 2.0 innovations due to industry adoption of common approaches that build from OpenAjax standards
- Interchangeability of OpenAjax Conformant products, such that customers can choose among multiple vendors (and change vendors in the future)
OpenAjax Conformance defines three conformance levels. Full Conformance is for Ajax products that have sufficiently strong Ajax interoperability characteristics that there is high expectation that the given product can be used successfully and conveniently with other Ajax products as part of the same Ajax development task. Configurable Conformance is for Ajax products that support all of the same strong interoperability characteristics as for Full Conformance, except not in their default configuration. Limited Conformance is for products that meet a particular subset of the conformance criteria, and therefore have taken important steps towards Ajax industry interoperability, but on the question of whether the given Ajax product can interoperate successfully and conveniently with other Ajax products, the answer is “it depends”.
The OpenAjax Registry is a centralized, industry-wide Ajax registration authority managed by the Interoperability Working Group at OpenAjax Alliance. The Registry maintains an industry-wide list of Ajax runtime libraries and various characteristics of each library. For each library, the Registry lists:
- JavaScript globals
- runtime extensions (both JavaScript and DOM)
- markup extensions (e.g., custom elements, attributes or CSS class names)
These two technologies have now entered a public review phase that ends on June 30, 2008. Feedback can come in various forms, such as email to public@openajax.org, or comments posted on various industry blogs. After the public review phase ends, the members of OpenAjax Alliance will adjust the two specifications to take the feedback into account and then move the two specifications towards version 1.0 completion and approval.
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Category: OpenAjax
Maybe it is “Open” Wednesday. Jon Ferraiolo of the OpenAjax Alliance reached out to ask your thoughts on a browser wishlist. I have been talking about OpenID and Jabber as well other things and now it is our turn to think about what we need.
Coach Wei is leading this task force and posted himself on the initiative.
The OpenAjax Alliance is developing an Ajax industry wishlist for future browsers, using a dedicated wiki for this initiative. The main purpose of the initiative is to inform the browser vendors about what future features are most important to the Ajax community and why. So far, the alliance has interviewed roughly a dozen industry leaders, including representatives from the ASP.NET AJAX, Dojo, Ext JS, Douglas Crockford of JSON fame, jQuery, Spry, and XAP, and recently held a townhall discussion on the feature request list among its members. The members have concluded that the wishlist (~25 items) is ready for public comments.
The alliance is now issuing a call-to-action to Ajax developers to participate in this initiative, which is open to both OpenAjax Alliance members and to non-members. The alliance especially would like participation from Ajax toolkit developers and leading web developers with expertise in using open browser technologies to achieve rich user experiences. To join the effort, create a wiki login for yourself by following the instructions on the wiki home page. After you have a login, you can then add new feature requests or comment on existing feature requests as you see fit. The initiative operates on an honor-system basis.
The moderators have attempted to make it possible that the community can add comments and vote on particular feature requests without large time commitments. For example, it is possible to simply vote for your favorite feature requests by adding a single row to a wiki table. The alliance’s wiki uses the same markup language as wikipedia.
Here is the timeline:
- April - Phase I review, where participants not only add comments, but also are asked to identify their Top 5 features (i.e., those features that are most critical for inclusion in next-generation browsers).
- May - The moderators reorganize and possibly trim away feature requests for which little interest was shown.
- June - Phase II review, where participants will be asked to provide importance ratings for each of the feature requests on a scale of 0.0 to 5.0.
- July - The moderators will produce a summary report and notify the major browser vendors about the results.
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
Category: OpenAjax
The 100+ members of OpenAjax Alliance recently approved the release of OpenAjax Hub 1.0, including the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 Specification, an open source reference implementation at SourceForge, and a complete test suite. OpenAjax Hub 1.0 is a small JavaScript library (<3K) that allows multiple Ajax toolkits to work together on the same browser frame. The central feature is a publish/subscribe event manager, which enables loose assembly and integration of Ajax components. OpenAjax Hub 1.0 allows multiple conformance options for Ajax libraries, some of which require only a couple of lines of new code. Some existing Ajax libraries, such as Dojo 1.0, bundle OpenAjax Hub 1.0 within their distribution.
The alliance’s second-generation initiatives will focus on secure mashups. OpenAjax Hub 1.1 will add support secure mashups, publish/subscribe across browser frames, and publish/subscribe between clients and servers (including Comet-based communications). A complementary second initiative, OpenAjax Metadata, will define industry standard Ajax library metadata that will be used by Ajax developer tools (i.e., IDEs) and mashup editors to create improved user experiences. OpenAjax Metadata will define:
- Standard XML metadata for “widgetsâ€, where widgets can be either the various UI controls found in Ajax toolkits or can be mini-applications such as Google Gadgets that can be used as components within a mashup. This metadata will allow Ajax IDEs to auto-populate widget palettes and property editors.
- Standard XML metadata for JavaScript APIs, which will allow Ajax IDEs to deliver intelligent code-assist features to JavaScript developers.
The alliance also will provide open source transcoders that allow existing proprietary widget/gadget technologies, such as Google Gadgets, to work with Hub 1.1 and OpenAjax Metadata, plus an open source mini mashup framework that leverages OpenAjax Hub 1.1 and OpenAjax Metadata. Early versions of these open source initiatives can be found at the OpenAjax Alliance project at Sourceforge.
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
Category: OpenAjax
Coach Wei is chair of the OpenAjax CommunicationHub task force, and he wants feedback:
CommunicationHub is another part of the technical work that OpenAjax Alliance has been working on. The goal of CommunicationHub is to identify and propose solutions for communications related interoperability issues, eventually leading to the formation of a working group around this area. The CommunicationHub Task Force consists of 19 members currently(Dojo, LightStreamer, SAP, IBM, Nexaweb, WebTide, OpenSpot, IceSoft, DWR, Tibco, VertexLogic, Adobe, eclayer, Zend, Oracle, OpenLink, coradiant, etc) and I chair the task force.
Based on the last few month’s discussion, the task force is gradually converging onto a common problem defintion.
The draft discusses issues with:
- Client side Ajax Push interoperability
- Client side Ajax Push multi-tab/window usability
- Server side Ajax communication interoperability
- Service side Ajax communication efficiency
What would you like to see come out of this?
