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Ajax-Based Dojo Toolkit: Page 2 of 7

The problem with Ajax at the moment--aside from a few technical issues regarding latency, scalability and other enterprise-class concerns--is that everyone codes Ajax in their own way, and no two Ajax toolkits are interoperable. The Dojo Foundation, a nonprofit organization established last year with the goal of providing a toolkit upon which developers can build dynamic Web applications consistently, is developing the Dojo Toolkit, one of the first efforts at a standardized toolkit. But there's no promise that a developer who's used Dojo can easily switch to the Kabuki Ajax toolkit. Kabuki was recently accepted for incubation by the Apache Software Foundation and is also being promoted by the OpenAjax Alliance.

The Open Ajax initiative is not tied to any specific toolkit, and there hasn't been a concerted effort as of yet to flesh out and provide a true "toolkit," though there are plenty of packages that bill themselves as such. But Dojo, which is an open-source DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript, seems to be a favorite and is receiving industry support from heavyweights BEA, IBM, Oracle and Sun, as well as Informatica and Laszlo.

The OpenAjax Alliance has been moving steadily forward and gaining momentum in organizing and determining its focus. The group is not a standards body, though when Ajax is ready for standardization it will be the members of this alliance that will no doubt be involved and work for its adoption. Rather, the alliance is an industry coalition through which all hope to benefit by promoting the general adoption of Ajax--which each hopes, of course, will lead to enterprise adoption of their platforms supporting the technology. The alliance has decided to organize itself along the lines of the WS-I, which, though not technically a standards body, is recognized as the source of interoperability and WS-* standards compliance specifications. WS-I compliance has become an important facet of SOA infrastructure products in the past year. If alliance members, many of which are also members of WS-I, can act on this goal, they may be able to bring standardization to Ajax without limiting innovation.

The alliance's initial goals are to develop a common syntax for specifying Ajax features and behaviors in the hopes that tooling and runtimes could become interoperable. This goal requires the specification of a declarative XML language, similar to Microsoft's forthcoming XAML, that tools could write to to generate the JavaScript runtime necessary to support the language. This also would result in an API for widgets, event handlers and other Ajax features.