OpenAjax Alliance

The OpenAjax Alliance is an industry group devoted to the set of technologies and Web programming techniques known as Ajax.

OpenAjax Alliance membership consists of vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax who work with Ajax-based Web technologies. The organization was formed by Ajax companies and open source projects to address issues that require coordination among the many organizations that create and/or use Ajax products and technologies. The alliance does not collect dues nor maintain a staff, and thus all of its activities are the result of voluntary contributions from its 100+ member organizations.

The organization's target customer is the Web developer or IT professional who wants to use Ajax technologies to deliver Web applications with rich user interfaces.

The alliance's technical focus is interoperability across Ajax products and technologies. Interoperability enables customers to integrate Ajax technologies from different Ajax technology providers.

OpenAjax Alliance engages in educational and communications activities, such as Web pages and white papers posted on its Web site, a wiki, email lists, and press releases.

History and Termination of Formal Operations

In late 2005, with leadership from IBM, companies brainstormed about how to ensure that Ajax fulfills its potential as the industry standard application platform based on open technologies. These early discussions came to a climax on Feb. 1, 2006, with the announcement of the "OpenAjax Initiative", whose 15 original companies included BEA, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Google, IBM, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra.[1]

Between February 1 and May 15, 2006, an additional 15 organizations joined "OpenAjax", and the (then) 30 companies held a two-day kickoff meeting in San Francisco to lay out the blue-print. At the meeting, the group decided to establish the OpenAjax Alliance, defined its mission, agreed on an interim organizational process, and established its activities.[2]

The participating companies then defined a governance model via a Members Agreement, and began execution on its marketing/educational and technical activities. The Web site and white paper went live in September 2006.[3] The alliance elected its first Steering Committee in October 2006.[4] The first technical product from the alliance was the OpenAjax Hub, with a draft specification and reference open source implementation completed by December 2006 and integrated a dozen Ajax toolkits on a trial basis as part of the alliance's first OpenAjax InteropFest.[5]

As of May 2008, the organization has 100+ member organizations, including companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and Sun, along with Ajax suppliers such as Dojo Foundation, Laszlo Systems, Nexaweb, Tibco and Zimbra, and a small number of individual members.

In October 2012, the Open Ajax Alliance formally terminated its operations.[6]

Members

The list of members of OpenAjax Alliance has been growing steadily. For the list of members, refer to the OpenAjax Alliance home page or the members wiki page .

Among the members are organizations that fall into some of the following categories:

How OpenAjax Alliance is organized

Steering Committee

The members of the OpenAjax Alliance elect representatives from seven companies to positions on the OpenAjax Alliance Steering Committee. The Steering Committee manages the affairs of the OpenAjax Alliance on behalf of its member organizations. Among other things, the Steering Committee has final approval on the creation of working groups and specifications.

Working Groups

The formal materials produced by OpenAjax Alliance are developed within Working Groups. The following two working groups have been formally chartered in accordance with process documents that the members have adopted.

Task Forces

The OpenAjax Alliance establishes task forces to investigate areas of new activity. The task forces are informal groups of members who perform research and then produce recommendations for future alliance activities. There are four task forces:

Specifications and open source

Although the OpenAjax Alliance does not intend to become a formal standards body, the alliance does engage in standards-related activities when such activities appear necessary in order to achieve objectives for greater interoperability, vendor choice and promoting innovation. As a result, the OpenAjax Alliance will sometimes develop its own formal specifications and/or open source to fill what it sees as critical industry gaps. In these cases, the expected outcome in the long term is to turn over such work at an appropriate point to a formal standards organization or open-source project.

Members of the OpenAjax Alliance may participate in standards activities within other standards bodies and open source projects to help accelerate the coordinated advancement of OpenAjax technologies and products.

OpenAjax Conformance

A cornerstone of OpenAjax Alliance activities is the definition of OpenAjax Conformance. OpenAjax Conformance is shorthand for the set of conformance requirements that the OpenAjax Alliance places on Ajax technologies, products and applications. By using Ajax products that support OpenAjax Conformance, OpenAjax claims that IT managers and Web developers would notice the following benefits:

To be OpenAjax Conformant, an Ajax product must:

OpenAjax hub

The OpenAjax hub is a small set of JavaScript technologies that addresses critical Ajax runtime interoperability requirements. Version 1.0 of the OpenAjax Hub has the following features:

OpenAjax Hub 2.0 is planned to extend the publish/subscribe features to support secure mashup workflows and client-server communications. For mashups, Hub 2.0 supports the isolation of mashup widgets into secure sandboxes and provides a mediated message bus.

The Alliance develops the OpenAjax Hub Specification and provides an open-source reference implementation.

OpenAjax Registry

The vision for the OpenAjax Registry is that, if finished, it will provide a centralized, industry-wide global object registration authority that would help to prevent JavaScript object collision within complex Ajax applications. The OpenAjax Registry is still under development.

Marketing and communication

The OpenAjax Alliance engages in various promotional, educational and communication activities. Its Web site provides a standard vocabulary for industry terms such as "Ajax" and "OpenAjax" and includes whitepapers and block diagrams on Ajax technologies and associated best practices, with a focus on cross-vendor interoperability. Representatives speak about OpenAjax at conferences and other industry events.

The OpenAjax Alliance Web site provides a central point of information about the OpenAjax vision, explaining how to adopt Ajax successfully so that IT developers will feel safe about their technology and vendor choices.

See also

References

  1. ↑ http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/19187.wss
  2. ↑ http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/22/78577_HNajaxforge_1.html
  3. ↑ http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=164720
  4. ↑ http://www.openajax.org/blog/?p=6
  5. ↑ http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/InteropFest_2007_March
  6. ↑ http://openajax.org/pipermail/steeringcommittee/2012q4/001023.html

Notes

[1]

  1. ↑ Open Aax Steering Committee email archive link to message asking for formal operations to terminate. http://openajax.org/pipermail/steeringcommittee/2012q4/001015.html
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