At the Rich Web Experience conference, the OpenAjax Alliance promotes OpenAjax Metadata, a specification to facilitate interoperability across AJAX IDEs. Another version of the OpenAjax Metadata specification supports widget interoperability and security.VIENNA, Va.—The OpenAjax Alliance is working to address interoperability issues among development environments for AJAX as well as to facilitate the creation of secure mashups.
At the Rich Web Experience conference here on Sept. 4, Jon Ferraiolo, an IBM engineer and director of the OpenAjax Alliance, a consortium of vendors and organizations working to promote AJAX interoperability, said the group has published draft specifications for ways to make AJAX IDEs (integrated development environments) more interoperable, to secure the creation of mashups and to make widgets more interoperable for use in mashups.
Ferraiolo said the capabilities in AJAX IDEs—such as code assist, debug and visual layout—ought to be interoperable across the different IDE platforms, but as each AJAX tool kit documents its APIs and widgets in its own way, that has been a problem. So the OpenAjax Alliance is working to overcome that problem with a new specification known as OpenAjax Metadata for AJAX Libraries, which delivers industry-standard XML for JavaScript APIs and user interface controls.
It should be possible for there to be intelligent code assist for APIs across different AJAX libraries, and visual design should be possible using widgets from AJAX libraries, Ferraiolo said. The OpenAjax Alliance specifications will help get to that point, he said.
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