There may be a lot of question marks hovering over Sun Microsystems these days, but its dedication to AJAXisn’t in doubt. The company has just appointed Greg Murray its AJAX Architect, making him the company’s chief cheerleader and evangelist for AJAX technology.
Murray is also the lead for Project jMaki, which allows Java developers to use JavaScript in their Java-based applications as either a JSP tag library or a JSF component.
Murray also works on the Java BluePrints and worked on the Java Pet Store 2.0 reference application that comes with Java 5 Enterprise Edition. He’s also joined the faculty for SYS-CON’s AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, being held October 3 & 4 in Santa Clara, CA.
This appointment makes official what Murray’s been doing on his own for the past year-and-a-half, he said. He will be working both within Sunand visiting companies in the Silicon Valley to spread the word on AJAX and hopefully continue his programming efforts.
“I like to get my hands dirty and work with the technology and with the community,” he said. He’ll be focused on things like what needs to be done to work with AJAX, what technologies work well with it and how Sun can better support AJAX.
“People will always need to be educated on AJAX,” he said. “Whether or not it’s a popular buzzword, it’s going to be important. It’s going to be at the core of our future Web apps, that’s why I’ve stuck with it rather than jump on the next thing.”
Java 6, the next release of the Java platform due later this year, will have scripting engines inside Java. It can be done now through Rhino, an open source JavaScript written entirely in Java by the Mozilla Foundation, but making it native to Java 6 will make that process much easier and simpler, he said.
Next week, Murray’s jMaki project will release a toolbar for Java IDEs, such as Dojo, for visually dropping jMaki widgets into JSP pages. This will make it easier to build AJAX applications by simple