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 “widgets”, 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?
