Open Ajax Alliance Offers New IDE and Mashup Tools
- By John K. Waters
- 10/28/08
The OpenAjax Alliance wants to make it easier--and safer--to build applications using the Ajax Web development technique. The group unveiled two standards initiatives at this year's AjaxWorld RIA Conference & Expo last week in San Jose, CA, including a new metadata specification and a new version of its mashup runtime.
"There are 10 to 20 Ajax IDEs on the market today, and a couple hundred Ajax toolkits (libraries)," said David Boloker, CTO of Emerging Internet Technology at sponsoring company IBM. "Different Ajax toolkits -- such as Dojo, JQuery and Prototype -- each documents their APIs in a different manner. So you have this problem of trying to get the IDEs to do a good job of supporting the toolkits."
To "do good things" with Ajax toolkits, the leading IDEs, such as Eclipse, NetBeans, Dreamweaver and Visual Studio, have had to do "one-off development work," Boloker said; it has been a largely library-by-library, manual process for the tool vendors. Adobe Systems, for example, has supported its own Adobe Spry toolkit in Dreamweaver. Visual Studio has supported Microsoft's Atlas Framework (ASP.NET Ajax). "You've got hundreds of toolkits and tens of IDEs, and there's very little coverage," he said.
The newly launched OpenAjax Metadata Integration initiative aims to solve this problem, Boloker said, by providing a standard way of representing JavaScript APIs and any widgets included in an Ajax toolkit. With that standard in place, the IDEs need to support only the OpenAjax format to support the toolkits. The standard will make it possible for the dev tools to work with any library, the Alliance asserted, and provide intelligent code assist, interactive help and drag-and-drop visual editing using Ajax widgets.
Adobe was among the companies onboard at the show with the new standard. Its Dreamweaver Creative Suite 4 is using the OpenAjax widget format as its native widget format, allowing it to interoperate with different widgets from other Ajax libraries. Also, the Eclipse Foundation has implemented the JavaScript API as part of the metadata format in its JavaScript Development Tool (JSDT) project. Aptana, a San Mateo, Calif.-based development tools maker, actually provided a set of standards that served as a starting point for the work in OpenAjax on this initiative, Boloker said.