In February, a group of technology vendors, including BEA Systems, Google, IBM, and Oracle, formed the OpenAjax Alliance, with the goal of promoting the popular AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development technique. Since then, more vendors, such as Sun Microsystems, have joined, and the alliance has launched its OpenAjax Hub project to boost interoperability among AJAX libraries. One of the founders of OpenAjax was David Boloker, who holds the titles of distinguished engineer and CTO of emerging internet technologies at the IBM software group. He also serves on the alliance"s steering committee. Infoworld editor at large Paul Krill spoke with Boloker at the AJAXWorld Conference and Expo last week about AJAX, the security issues around it, and the possibilities of other vendors such as Microsoft and Apple joining the alliance.
Infoworld: Why did you found OpenAjax?Boloker: If you go back nine months, the key problem that folks were having was, one: What exactly is the definition of AJAX? The second problem was: How do you get a message out to all parties that would be cross-vendor? The third thing was: From a technology standpoint, how can you basically start looking at what was going to happen when looking across toolkits?