Accelerating Customer Success with Ajax
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The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies who have come together to promote customer success with Ajax. The alliance has more than 100 members, including industry giants such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, and Vodafone, and several of the leading Ajax open source projects. Since it was founded in 2006, the alliance has launched both technology initiatives and educational initiatives. The alliance’s technology initiatives address key Ajax interoperability issues so that developers can successfully use multiple Ajax technologies within the same Web application. With its educational initiatives, the alliance helps inform the community on how to achieve success with Ajax using open technologies.
OpenAjax Alliance home page Organization OpenAjax Alliance is a fully voluntary organization. There are no membership fees. Membership is open to any organizations or individuals who can demonstrate that they support the alliance’s Purpose, which is to promote customer success with the open technologies that make up Ajax (e.g., HTML and JavaScript). The members of OpenAjax Alliance elect a Steering Committee of seven members who provide executive oversight. At this moment, the Steering Committee consists of Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, IBM, Microsoft, Nexaweb, TIBCO, and Zend. Nearly all of the work of OpenAjax Alliance happens in committees. Working Groups are formally chartered and can produce formal Specifications that define industry standards or deliver open source to the industry. Task Forces explore new areas of activity, often in advance of a formally chartered Working Group. Educational Activities OpenAjax Alliance has produced a series of white papers that help IT managers and Web developers be successful with Ajax. The white papers describe such things as what Ajax is, what is possible with Ajax, criteria for deciding whether Ajax techniques are appropriate for particular application, and how to avoid security vulnerabilities.
OpenAjax Alliance white papers Ajax Toolkit Interoperability The main thrust of OpenAjax Alliance’s technical activities is to drive interoperability between the many Ajax products in the marketplace. Among the interoperability initiatives at the alliance are the following:
Secure Mashups The alliance recently launched a set of coordinated initiatives that will unleash the power of Ajax mashups, while preventing malicious attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF), from 3rd party widgets. The first new mashup initiative is OpenAjax Hub 1.1. OpenAjax Hub 1.1 extends the publish/subscribe features found in OpenAjax Hub 1.0 to allow incorporation of untrusted mashup components (“widgets”) from 3rd parties. Using a technology called “SMash” that was contributed by IBM to OpenAjax Alliance, untrusted widgets are isolated into IFRAMEs and can only communicate with the rest of the mashup through a secure, mediated message bus. The alliance is developing both a formal specification which will serve as an open industry standard, and also producing a commercial-ready open source reference implementation. The second new mashup initiative is OpenAjax Metadata. In today’s mashup industry, there are dozens of proprietary widget formats. OpenAjax Metadata defines a single industrystandard XML metadata for widgets. The alliance has a companion open source project that is producing a set of transcoders from popular proprietary widget formats, such as Google Gadgets, into OpenAjax Metadata. The alliance is also developing a simple open source mashup application that leverages OpenAjax Hub 1.1, OpenAjax Metadata, and the open source widget transcoders, thereby allowing integration of both OpenAjax-compatible widgets and existing proprietary widgets, such as Google Gadgets.
OpenAjax Alliance interoperability events Ajax Developer Tools Another interoperability initiative focuses on Ajax developer tools (i.e., IDEs). The OpenAjax Metadata specification, mentioned earlier, also defines industry standards for the APIs and UI controls within Ajax libraries, with the interoperability goal that arbitrary Ajax libraries will work with arbitrary Ajax IDEs. Mobile Ajax Ajax is moving to mobile devices, where phones such as the Apple iPhone and the Nokia Series 60 phones ship with web browsers that support the same HTML/Ajax capabilities as desktop computers and therefore can view the full Web. It is clear that, sometime in the near future, the vast majority of the billions of cell phones will support Ajax. The Mobile Task Force is pursuing various initiatives to accelerate the time when Mobile Ajax becomes a mainstream part of the Web. The task force is producing a white paper that educates the developer community about the special requirements and unique opportunities for Ajax on mobile devices, and includes a series of specific developer tips for successful use Ajax on mobile devices. The alliance has also launched a technical initiative around allowing the “Web Runtime” (i.e., the HTML+JavaScript engine used by the browser) to gain access to mobile device APIs within the context of a security manager. This will allow better user experiences by allowing integration of information such as current location and the phone dialer into the Ajax-powered user experience. Runtime Advocacy The alliance recently launched its Runtime Advocacy Task Force, which is collecting a unified wish list of key features needed in future browsers in order to unleash the full potential of next-generation of Ajax applications. The alliance will lead industry-wide collaboration on the development of this feature request list, where industry leaders exchange ideas and opinions, and then rate the relative importance that the Ajax community assigns to those features. Ajax Security Many of the industry’s security experts are working together in OpenAjax Alliance’s Security Task Force to address key issues related to security. Last year, the task force was instrumental in the alliance’s white paper on “Ajax and Mashup Security”. Current initiatives include coordination efforts with the Mobile Task Force on security issues with device APIs and investigations around identity and authorization sharing among the various components in a mashup. Future In less than two years of existence, OpenAjax Alliance has seen rapid growth in membership and rapid growth in the scope of its interoperability initiatives. The industry demands an open and interoperable Web, so we can expect additional interoperability initiatives at OpenAjax Alliance in the months and years ahead. OpenAjax Alliance interoperability events |
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