The Open AJAX consortium formed three months ago will hold its first formal meeting next week, bringing together more than two dozen participating vendors to draw up a road map for furthering their shared goal of easing AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development work.
"The most needed thing right now is to start looking at how do we reduce the cost and skill requirements [of AJAX development]," said David Boloker, CTO of emerging technology for IBM. "Today, you have to be a very skilled JavaScript programmer."
While IBM has no formal leadership role in Open AJAX, which recently signed on 13 new members, it was a catalyst for the group's creation. New recruits Adobe, SAP, Tibco, Fair Isaac and Opera join a consortium that already includes BEA, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, the Eclipse Foundation, Mozilla, Novell and Red Hat, among others.
Next week's meeting, hosted by Adobe in San Francisco, will be the first in-person gathering of Open AJAX representatives. Goals for the two-day summit include identifying development priorities, such as a new Apache proposal for an AJAX development framework called XAP.
"Microsoft just very recently received an invitation to join Open Ajax, and we are open to a dialogue about the best way to help developers working with AJAX," said to Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft's lead product manager for Web platform and tools, in a written statement. "OpenAjax is definitely an interesting development and any cooperation in the community is always goodness for developers."
