We are pleased to announce that one of the leading mobile phone makers, Sony Ericsson, has joined OpenAjax Alliance and will participate in our Mobile Ajax activities. We look forward to their help in advancing Ajax technologies on mobile devices.
The OpenAjax Alliance is developing an Ajax industry wishlist for future browsers, using a dedicated wiki. The feature list now lists 37 separate feature requests, covering a wide range of technology areas, such as security, Comet, multimedia, CSS, interactivity, and performance. The goal is to inform the browser vendors about what the Ajax developer community feels are most important for the next round of browsers (i.e., FF4, IE9, Safari4, and Opera10) and to provide supplemental details relative to the feature requests.
The initiative is now in its final voting phase, and the alliance is issuing a call-to-action to Ajax developers to vote on which features should have the highest priority. To make the voting process as quick and painless as possible, the voting page lists all 37 feature requests, along with a popup menu for each feature with possible values of 0 (no importance) to 10 (highest importance). The voting period ends on July 10, 2008. To vote, you will need a wiki login (as explained on the wiki home page) and then cast your votes on the Phase II Voting wiki page. The alliance also strongly encourages people to comment on the wiki pages for each of the existing features and to add any important new features that are not yet on the list.
The initiative 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. The initiative operates on an honor-system basis.
The Mobile Task Force at OpenAjax Alliance has completed its fast-track exploratory phase into Mobile Device APIs.
What we mean by the term “Mobile Device APIs” are JavaScript APIs available within the browser engine to allow HTML+JavaScript applications to access device-resident capabilities such as current location, the phone dialer, the address book, the SMS system, the MMS system, the local email system, battery levels, network connection status, and various other things such that the next generation of Mobile Ajax applications can be delivered to the community, but in the context of appropriate security measures. Our effort looked at 4 scenarios: running in the browser, running as a widget, running within a compiled application, and site-specific browser applications.
The OpenAjax Mobile Task Force decided in February to pursue a fast-track exploratory phase where the time period was fixed (i.e., finish by the end of April, 2008) and we would try to get as far as possible in assembling use cases, requirements, and characterizing security considerations. The main purpose of the exploratory phase was to get a broadbrush characterization so that the members of OpenAjax Alliance could make decisions in the May/June timeframe about what formal activities at OpenAjax Alliance might help move the industry forward.
The exploratory phase met (and probably exceeded) our objectives. As we had hoped, we assembled a good set of use cases and requirements and outlined a conceptual framework around security considerations. Many thanks to the participants, which included contributions from Aplix, Cisco, IBM, Ikivo, MobileAware, Motricity, Mozilla, Oracle, and Vodafone. (Sorry about any omissions.)
Now it is May/June, and we have indeed decided on our next step, which is to launch on open source project. I will blog about that later.
(Note: One more apology. This post should have gone out about a month ago when the exploratory phase actually finished.)
The OpenAjax Alliance has recently published two new white papers, one on Mobile Ajax and one on recent browser advances.
The first white paper, Introduction to Mobile Ajax for Developers, provides an overview of Ajax application development for mobile devices. The white paper was the collaborative effort among several leading companies in the mobile industry within the OpenAjax Alliance’s Mobile Task Force. The target audience for the white paper is both the Ajax desktop developer who wants to also support mobile phones and the existing mobile developer who is interested in moving towards Ajax for future application development. The white paper characterizes the state of Mobile Ajax today, identifies the key challenges, and highlights the unique opportunities for innovative new applications offered by today’s mobile devices (e.g., telephony, location, camera, SMS). The white paper provides a comprehensive list of developer tips for addessing the challenges and taking advantage of the opportunities.
The second white paper, Good News for Ajax - The Browser Wars Are Back, highlights the major changes in the browser world that are manifesting themselves in this year’s browser releases (i.e., IE8, Firefox3, Safari 3.1, Opera 9.x). The white paper describes how the Open Web, after years of slow advancement, is now adding key features at a rapid rate. The white paper highlights the importance of the new Mobile Web, where desktop Web browser software is appearing on mobile platforms from leading mobile vendors, with shipping products or announcements already from Apple, Google (Android), Microsoft, and Nokia. The long-term result of today’s healthy, fast-paced competition among the browser vendors will be better cross-browser interoperability, improved performance, and major new opportunities to developers for innovation.
The OpenAjax Alliance is requesting industry feedback on two companion initiatives, OpenAjax Conformance and the OpenAjax Registry, which have been under development for the past year.
The term OpenAjax Conformance is shorthand for the set of conformance requirements that OpenAjax Alliance places on Ajax technologies, products, and applications to promote interoperability. Version 1 of OpenAjax Conformance defines 10 specific conformance requirements on Ajax runtime libraries. An Ajax runtime library that meets these conformance requirements will allow Web developers to use that library conveniently within a given Web page with other OpenAjax Conformant libraries.
OpenAjax Conformance provides the following benefits to IT managers and the Ajax developer community:
OpenAjax Conformance defines three conformance levels. Full Conformance is for Ajax products that have sufficiently strong Ajax interoperability characteristics that there is high expectation that the given product can be used successfully and conveniently with other Ajax products as part of the same Ajax development task. Configurable Conformance is for Ajax products that support all of the same strong interoperability characteristics as for Full Conformance, except not in their default configuration. Limited Conformance is for products that meet a particular subset of the conformance criteria, and therefore have taken important steps towards Ajax industry interoperability, but on the question of whether the given Ajax product can interoperate successfully and conveniently with other Ajax products, the answer is “it depends”.
The OpenAjax Registry is a centralized, industry-wide Ajax registration authority managed by the Interoperability Working Group at OpenAjax Alliance. The Registry maintains an industry-wide list of Ajax runtime libraries and various characteristics of each library. For each library, the Registry lists:
These two technologies have now entered a public review phase that ends on June 30, 2008. Feedback can come in various forms, such as email to public@openajax.org, or comments posted on various industry blogs. After the public review phase ends, the members of OpenAjax Alliance will adjust the two specifications to take the feedback into account and then move the two specifications towards version 1.0 completion and approval.
We are pleased to announce Orange France Telecom as new members of OpenAjax Alliance and new members of our Mobile Task Force. France Telecom is one of the largest cell phone operator companies in the world, where Orange is their key brand. We look forward to their contributions.
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:
The members of OpenAjax Alliance held their fifth face-to-face meeting on March 21, 2008 at IBM offices in NYC. We made good progress on several fronts, despite only having one day for the meeting.
In the morning we went through all 29 browser feature requests from the Runtime Task Force and then held a 1-hour conversation with the IE8 team about our views on the new features from IE8. In the afternoon, we reviewed OpenAjax Hub 1.1 and OpenAjax Metadata, and then made key decisions about OpenAjax Conformance and OpenAjax Registry.
An executive summary about what happened can be found on the face-to-face-summary page. For a full record of the meeting, see the detailed minutes.
The Mobile TF has decided to pursue a fast-track effort to define key use cases and key requirements around allowing JavaScript access to mobile device APIs, along with a characterization of potential security vulnerabilities and where a security framework is needed to address those vulnerabilities. Mobile device APIs would allow the “Web Runtime” (used within the browser, used within widgets, and used for the device’s built-in applications) to gain access to things such as location (e.g., GPS), contact list, phone log, email boxes, phone dialog, connection status (e.g., connection speed and whether roaming), SMS services, MMS services, and the camera. The plan is to push hard for 2 months, between now and April 30, to get as far as possible with our fast-track requirements phase. After April 30, we will then look at the use cases and requirements and decide whether to launch formal activities, such as a standards effort or an open source effort.
Looking forward to what might happen after April 30, there is a strawman proposal where OpenAjax Alliance pursues an open source initiative to develop a shim layer of JavaScript APIs to access mobile device services, and then various JavaScript adapter providers plug into the shim layer to map the OpenAjax APIs to native services. For example, one provider might map the shim layer to a JavaScript library that attaches to J2ME’s device APIs, available via MSA. Another provider might map the shim layer to a JavaScript library that attaches to Windows Mobile services, another to Google Gears mobile services, etc. We will put this strawman proposal on the shelf for the next two months as we go through our fast-track requirements efforts, and then evaluate the strawman to see if it is a good way to go forward.
The OpenAjax Alliance site (http://www.openajax.org) has received a minor facelift. The menu has been moved from the left side to the top, with dropdown menus. By doing this, the web site now provides more visibility into our current activities and more convenience for navigating around our site. Also, the front page now highlights recent news.
One of the side effects from the Web site update is that there is now a mobile version for our Web site. The back-end logic generates one template for desktop browsers (i.e., IE, Firefox and Safari other than the iPhone) and a different template for all other browsers, which are assumed to be mobile devices. The result is an experience that is faster and friendlier for mobile devices. Opera on all devices is supported via the mobile template, mainly because of my discovery midway through development that the toolbar widget that I was using did not work on Opera.