Microsoft Passes AJAX Interoperability Test

Microsoft quietly announced in a pair of blog posts this week that it has passed the OpenAJAX InteropFest 1.0 interoperability tests, meaning that its AJAX tools work in an OpenAJAX environment.

The Redmond, Wash. software company just joined the year-and-a-half-old OpenAJAX Alliance in March. AJAX  has become a mainstay for programming applications on the Web.

The acknowledgment that Microsoft’s AJAX toolset had passed came from a blog post by Brad Abrams, group program manager at Microsoft for ASP.NET AJAX, formerly codenamed Atlas. ASP.NET AJAX was developed to simplify writing AJAX applications using Microsoft’s .Net technologies. Microsoft shipped version 1 of the ASP.NET AJAX extensions and controls in January.

An alliance statement this week confirmed Microsoft’s tools passed the interoperability tests.

The alliance was initially formed in early 2006 by IBM, along with Google, Yahoo, BEA, Borland, the Eclipse Foundation, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, and others.

Now its membership is up to 90 companies, organizations, and interested parties, and includes other heavy hitters such as Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Fidelity Investments and American Greetings.

“The prime objective is to accelerate customer success with AJAX by promoting a customer’s ability to mix and match solutions from AJAX technology providers and by helping to drive the future of the AJAX ecosystem,” say alliance statements regarding the group’s goals.

“InteropFest 1.0 … is the final integration testing phase of OpenAJAX Hub 1.0 [which] is a small JavaScript library that allows multiple AJAX toolkits to work together on the same page,” the statements continue.

In a second blog post, Bertrand Le Roy, a Microsoft software design engineer, explained the company’s testing procedures.

Microsoft’s announcement came just before the start of this week’s AJAXWorld Conference held in Santa Clara, Calif.