Blogs

So first off we launched our site (www.openajax.org) last week! Which we’re all very excited about:) Right now we have over 50 member companies, and this is growing substantially. Jon Ferraiolo told us today that he’s received more than 50 emails in the last business days since the new site went live. A good sign. With the new site we also received a donation, the domain OpenAjax.org which is much cleaner and easier to remember than www.openajaxalliance.org, yah! It was pretty loose to joing at first, all you had to do was email and Jon, have a chat and he’d determine if it made sense. Now you have sign an agreement that mostly has to do with IPR issues and the steeting committee has to approve you, so we’re getting serious.

Microsoft still hasn’t joined, maybe they never will:( One can imagine they have some reservations abuut jumping with IBM and a bunch of open source projects with out considering it carefully. Mind you Atlas has a kind of interesting license, from an MS perspective anyway. Still I think it’s important for them and the rest of the group that they get on board, come we’re all grown ups!

We’ve also published an Ajax white paper which is a great semi technical resource to get up to speed on what Ajax is, what it can do for you and how to go about doing it. Check it out here or download the PDF here.

The white paper is nice but it’s mostly a marketing piece and something for the media and analysts to grab onto. The actual work product is the OpenAjax Hub which is an open source project, that will facilitate different Ajax frameworks, JavaScript libraries and components to work together in the same app or on the same page. Of the 50 some companies involved in the effort there’s only a handful of people writing code, but I’m sure this will change with the first check-ins to SourceForge. The goal is to have something usable by early 2007!

So what is Nitobi’s involvement? Well, I’m on the marketing committee with Alexei, Dave‘s working with Declarative Markup and James is working on interoperability stuff. Unfortunately none of us have all the time we’d like to have to devote to this valuable industry effort…but that’s what the way things roll sometimes. So what do we do? Well for staters we have conference calls every 2 weeks, where we discuss what we do and what we have to. They’re pretty typical committee conference calls, you never get as much done as you want to or think you could but things are moving along. The tech committees actually write code and discuss interop and architecture issues, the maketing folks have come up with website, white paper and press releases. So not bad. But we are not a standards body so don’t expect any;-)

We’re having our second face-to-face meeting next week at the Sun offices in Santa Clara, right after AjaxWorld. This will be my first and I’m looking forward to meeting everyone in person.

Just wanted to give a special mention to Jon from IBM, as I think he’s done a tremendous job getting things done and managing the whole committee process. Neither of which are small feats!

technorati tags:openajax, openajaxalliance, ajax, nitobi

Blogged with Flock