For OpenAjax, the first round of standards efforts is not enough

Although AJAX has now "entered the mainstream," the 350 existing implementations of the browser-oriented open source development language could still hardly be called interoperable, according to a leader of the OpenAjax Alliance.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - In a session today at the AJAXWorld conference, Jon Ferraiolo, operations manager of the OpenAjax Alliance and a Web architect at IBM, said membership in his alliance has gradually grown from 15 companies to more than 100 since it was originally formed back in 2006, the year after the first Ajax implementations started to emerge.

Early on, Ferraiolo said, alliance members agreed on a common definition of AJAX as a set of technologies providing a "desktop-like user interface in the browser."

Other the years, the various flavors of AJAX (typically in all-caps except in "OpenAjax Alliance") have become less likely to interfere with one another. But they don't always work well in conjunction with each other, either, he argued.

Consequently, the alliance later launched a "second wave" of standards efforts revolving around four new interoperability projects.

Under the first project, Hub 1.1, components such as calendar widgets, layout images, and media effects can now co-exist in the same browser, "even if they don't know each other are there," Ferraiolo told the audience. "This is a loose coupling of components which (otherwise) wouldn't know what to do with each other."

The second project, aimed at greater interoperability among AJAX registries, is now almost finished. Still to come, however, are projects around metadata and AJAX best practices.