The old line and the new guard in technology joined a group focused on delivering an open source project based at promoting the adoption of web development using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML technology.

Even though Microsoft developed the technology behind what has become known as Ajax, it is not part of the Open Ajax group. The initiative behind the group includes plenty of other tech powerhouses: IBM, Google, Oracle, Yahoo, Red Hat and Mozilla.

IBM led the way in releasing details about the Open Ajax group. By using Ajax technology, developers can create web applications that update within a web page, instead of requiring the web browser to reload the complete page each time an element of the page content changes. Applications like Google’s Gmail and Yahoo News make use of Ajax in their functionality.

IBM noted how another contributor to the Open Ajax project, Zimbra, has agreed to make some valuable technology available:

Zimbra, which has been developing Ajax applications for two years, will make its Ajax runtime toolkit available to the community under Apache and Mozilla public licenses. The runtime toolkit provides an object-oriented JavaScript class library with a standard set of widgets, an event framework, and communication tools. The resulting applications can be served from virtually any server and run in any browser, including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.


Also, IBM plans to contribute software to the Eclipse Project and the Mozilla Foundation to facilitate Ajax development. IBM said its proposed Eclipse Ajax toolkit framework would support multiple Ajax runtime toolkits; the framework supports Zimbra’s runtime, as well as ones from Dojo and OpenRico.