Sun Microsystems certainly is serious about its dedication to the AJAXtechnology, as the firm has joined a pair of alliances dedicated to improving the programming model and the overall state of AJAX.
The two groups welcoming Sun are the OpenAJAX Alliance and Dojo Foundation. As part of the OpenAJAX Alliance, Sun will work with more 30 member companies and organizations to identify and consolidate best practices for Ajax development, develop programming models around a reference implementation for tools interoperability and generate wider AJAX adoption throughout the industry.
The Dojo Foundation is a non-profit organization for JavaScript programming. Sun will be involved in developing the Dojo Toolkit, an open source JavaScript toolkit for making professional Web development faster and easier. Sunwill contribute AJAX widgets, help with internationalization efforts and refining documentation.
As a member of these two groups, Sun will be bumping into IBM, which has been Sun’s chief nemesis in the Java space with its open source Java project, the Eclipse Foundation. But in this case, no hard feelings, said Dan Roberts, director of marketing for tools at Sun.
“This is one occasion where you see IBM and Sun agree to publicly work together on Web standards. It’s a joining together of the Java community across the board to build AJAX apps and create standards for them and insure there’s interoperability across the board,” he said.
In addition to joining these two communities, Sun announced a preview of a new NetBeans tool to support jMaki, an open source JavaScript wrapper framework for building AJAX apps.