Mobile Ajax Task Force kick-off meeting

Blogged by: Jon Ferraiolo on July 29, 2007 at 7:37 am

OpenAjax Alliance will launch its Mobile Ajax Task Force with a kick-off meeting on August 1, 2007. The new task force is chaired by Rhys Davis of Volantis. At the kick-off meeting, we will begin discussions about about how OpenAjax Alliance might add value to the Mobile Ajax industry via educational and/or technical initiatives.

Ajax Security Task Force launched, with white paper in the works

Blogged by: Jon Ferraiolo on July 29, 2007 at 7:33 am

The Security Task Force, chaired by Larry Koved of IBM, has been meeting for the past couple of months. Its mission in general is to determine how OpenAjax Alliance can provide value to the Ajax community either via educational activities or technical initiatives.

The task force is making quick progress. In collaboration with the Marketing Working Group, the task force is authoring an Ajax Security White Paper that is far along. The task force also has begun developing resource pages on the OpenAjax wiki that will help Ajax developers find the best methods for developing secure Ajax applications. The task force members are also likely to be intimately involved in any Hub 1.1 efforts, especially efforts around providing a framework for secure mashups.

OpenAjax Hub 1.1 planning begins

Blogged by: Jon Ferraiolo on July 29, 2007 at 7:21 am

With OpenAjax Hub 1.0 on the verge of completion, the members of OpenAjax Alliance have begun the planning process for OpenAjax Hub 1.1. No decisions have been made, but recent discussion has centered on extending the Hub 1.0’s publish/subscribe mechanisms. Whereas OpenAjax Hub 1.0 focuses on publish/subscribe within a single browser frame, we are looking at the following two feature areas for Hub 1.1: (1) extending the pub/sub engine to allow cross-frame pub/sub and client-server pub/sub (including Comet-style server push), (2) providing a framework for secure mashups. Some of the proposals submitted by members can be found on the Communications Hub Task Force wiki page. I wrote a strawman proposal for Hub 1.1 which has been reviewed to some extent, with feedback that there probably are simpler mechanisms than don’t require always have to establish a “room”. Several people are advocating that we do open source implementations to verify approaches and then the necessary APIs will become clear.

Another technical area that might be addressed either in parallel with Hub 1.1 or as part of Hub 1.1 are JavaScript name collisions. We had started work in this area with Hub 1.0, but decided to postpone that work from Hub 1.0. We are now looking at JavaScript name collisions again as we have resumed discussions about the OpenAjax Registry.

InteropFest 1.0 begins

Blogged by: Jon Ferraiolo on July 29, 2007 at 6:56 am

InteropFest 1.0 is an interoperability event spanning the months of July to September 2007 where multiple Ajax toolkits use the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 to achieve multi-toolkit integration. The InteropFest is expected to be the last step in verifying OpenAjax Hub 1.0 for completeness, correctness and suitability.

We expect 20+ Ajax toolkits and products to participate in this event, which (if this happens) would be approximately double the 12 that participated in our January-to-March InteropFest. There will be AJAXWorld “InteropFest” booth placards for participating member organizations and there is a good chance of a press release that lists the participating member organizations.

To participate in InteropFest 1.0, read the instructions on the InteropFest wiki page. You can download the InteropFest template source files from our open source project at SourceForge. There is an InteropFest 1.0 download package on the download page.

Updated Development Process

Blogged by: Jon Ferraiolo on July 17, 2007 at 10:40 am

The membership and Steering Committee have approved an updated Development Process. This document defines the rules for establishing Working Groups and for publishing Specifications and other material. The most significant changes with the new version are in providing details about the approval process for specifications that were missing previously.

Approved process for individuals to join OpenAjax Alliance

Blogged by: Jon Ferraiolo on July 17, 2007 at 10:34 am

The membership and Steering Committee have now approved extending membership on an exceptional basis to key individuals in the Ajax community. To become a member as an individual, an individual must have an established track record of involvement and contribution to the Ajax community, and/or has experience and expertise of specific interest to the OpenAjax Alliance. There is an updated How to Join web page that provides the details.

IDE Working Group Approved

Blogged by: Jon Ferraiolo on July 17, 2007 at 10:24 am

The OpenAjax Alliance membership and Steering Committee have approved formation of the IDE Working Group, which will pursue metadata standards for Ajax libraries. These metadata standards will allow plug-and-play of Ajax toolkits into Ajax IDEs such that IDEs will be able to provide visual interfaces for the library’s controls (visual and non-visual) and code completion for the Ajax library’s APIs. The IDE Working Group is nearing completion of its requirements document and will soon begin work on the metadata specification.

Stable snapshot of OpenAjax Hub 1.0

Blogged by: Jon Ferraiolo on July 9, 2007 at 8:12 am

We have now posted a stable snapshot of both the specification and open source project for OpenAjax Hub 1.0. We have labeled this snapshot as version 0.6 and it matches build 100 within the open source project. We believe the open source project is now complete in that it correctly implements all features that we plan to include in OpenAjax Hub 1.0 and we believe that the specification describes those features correctly. The focus right now is: (a) final verification by doing various sample applications which use the Hub in conjunction with multiple Ajax toolkits, (b) final editorial work on the specification.

The latest specification can be found at /member/wiki/OpenAjax_Hub_Specification. The open source project is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openajaxallianc.