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:

• April - Phase I review, where participants not only add comments, but also are asked to identify their Top 5 features (i.e., those features that are most critical for inclusion in next-generation browsers).
• May - The moderators reorganize and possibly trim away feature requests for which little interest was shown.
• June - Phase II review, where participants will be asked to provide importance ratings for each of the feature requests on a scale of 0.0 to 5.0.
• July - The moderators will produce a summary report and notify the major browser vendors about the results.

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.

An initial draft of the OpenAjax Hub 1.1 Specification has been added to the OpenAjax wiki. This draft of the Hub 1.1 spec is a copy of the Hub 1.0 spec, plus new chapters that describe the Hub 1.1’s secure mashup framework. The draft specification includes a complete strawman proposal for new connection-based APIs that allow child gadgets to communicate with the parent mashup container and other gadgets within the container through a mediated message bus. An early open source implementation of the proposed APIs can be found in the SVN tree for the OpenAjax open source project.

The members of OpenAjax Alliance will meet in New York City on Friday, March 21, at IBM’s downtown offices at 590 Madison. The meeting will take place the day after the AJAXWorld Conference and Expo, which is also in New York City. The agenda as it stands now includes a town hall discussion about the IE8 announcement, a town hall discussion of the Runtime Task Force feature list, and then discussion of OpenAjax Hub 1.1, OpenAjax Metadata, OpenAjax Registry and OpenAjax Conformance. If you are a member of OpenAjax Alliance and will be attending, please register on the registration page. If a non-member and wish to attend, please contact Jon Ferraiolo (jferrai@us.ibm.com).

There has been quite a bit going on at OpenAjax Alliance lately, what with the completion and approval of OpenAjax Hub 1.0, progress on the OpenAjax Registry, progress within the IDE Working Group on the OpenAjax Metadata specification, new open source efforts on OpenAjax Hub 1.1 and gadgets, and creation of a new wiki to help with the efforts of the Runtime Advocacy Task Force. Because of all of these various activities, I failed to notice when our 100th member joined. As I look right now, I count 103 members. In any case, congratulations to the alliance on reaching this milestone.

The IDE Working Group, in collaboration with the Gadgets Task Force, has completed an initial draft of the “OpenAjax Metadata Specification”. OpenAjax Metadata represents a set of industry-standard metadata defined by the OpenAjax Alliance that enhances interoperability across Ajax toolkits and Ajax products. With version 1.0, OpenAjax Alliance defines metadata for the following:

• Ajax widgets - OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 defines metadata for two definitions of the term “widget”:
  • UI controls - Some Ajax libraries provide a set of user interface building block components such as combo boxes, menu bars, or charts
  • Mashup components (aka “widgets” and “gadgets”) - Mashup frameworks allow for pre-packaged mini-applications (sometimes called “widgets” or “gadgets”) to be combined together within a composite application (the “mashup”), where the mashup components react to each other intelligently, such as when the user selects an address in one component which causes a different component to display an updated map that shows the given address.
• Ajax APIs - OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 provides a reasonably comprehensive set of metadata that describes the runtime JavaScript APIs (e.g., classes and methods) that are available for an Ajax library.
• Ajax libraries - OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 defines a handful of metadata fields for Ajax runtime libraries, much of which aligns with entries in the OpenAjax Registry.

The primary target consumers of OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 are software products. It is expected that these software products will consume and use the metadata to provide enhanced experience for users who building Ajax-powered solutions. In particular:

• Mashup frameworks will use OpenAjax Metadata to use OpenAjax Metadata for widgets, such as the message types that the widget produces and consumes and the customization parameters that the widget supports
• Ajax IDEs will use OpenAjax Metadata to provide the developer with (presumably automatically-generated) API documentation, intelligent code-assist, widget palettes, and widget property editors

The draft specification can be found at: http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/OpenAjax_Metadata_Specification. The IDE Working Group is early in the development process, so it is expected that there will be significant changes as the Working Group, implementers, and the public provide feedback. Public feedback is encouraged and can be sent to public@openajax.org.

I am proud to announce that the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 Specification [1] has been approved by the Interoperability Working Group, the members, and the OpenAjax Alliance Steering Committee. This represents the first approved Specification for OpenAjax Alliance per the terms of the OpenAjax Alliance Members Agreement. [2] and is therefore an important milestone for the alliance.

We have been working on Hub 1.0 for about 18 months, developing the spec [1], developing an open source reference implementation [3] and an open source test suite [3], and have verified our work with two major interoperability events, [4] and [5]. In the second interoperability event, the Hub was used to exchange messages among 19 different Ajax toolkits, including most of the toolkits with the highest market share.

OpenAjax Hub provides standard JavaScript that, when included with an Ajax-powered Web application, promotes the ability for multiple Ajax toolkits to work together on the same page. The central feature of the OpenAjax Hub is its publish/subscribe event manager (the “pub/sub manager”), which enables loose assembly and integration of Ajax components. With the pub/sub manager, one Ajax component can publish (i.e., broadcast) an event to which other Ajax components can subscribe, thereby allowing these components to communicate with each other through the Hub, which acts as an intermediary message bus. The umbrella use case for the OpenAjax Hub is the set of scenarios in which an Ajax developer needs to deploy a single application that uses multiple Ajax libraries simultaneously.

Here are some links:

[1] Final approved specification: http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/OpenAjax_Hub_Specification_v10
[2] Members Agreement: http://www.openajax.org/process/OpenAjax%20Members%20Agreement%20Final%2020060816.pdf
[3] Open source reference implementation and test suite: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openajaxallianc
[4] First InteropFest: http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/InteropFest_2007_March
[5] Second InteropFest: http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/InteropFest_1.0

The next phase is OpenAjax Hub 1.1, which will add secure mashup support and client-server communications. We expect an initial draft specifications and open source to appear in the next few weeks.

The OpenAjax Registry (http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/OpenAjax_Registry) is a centralized, industry-wide Ajax toolkit and JavaScript global object registration authority managed by the Interoperability Working Group at OpenAjax Alliance.

After a few months of focused effort, the Registry is now far along. The Interoperability Working Group has defined how the Registry will be posted, how submissions are made, and how submissions are evaluated and approved.

Some of our members have submitted Registry Candidates (http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/Registry_Candidates) for their Ajax toolkits. We expect that most of the existing submissions will result in a first batch of approvals that will take place in early 2008 and result in the first formal release of the Registry. To the other Ajax toolkits, please submit your toolkit information and list of globals per the instructions on the Registry wiki page.