ACADEMIA

Plans to Help Drive the Next Phase of Internet Application Development Using the AJAX Model -- Sun Microsystems, the creator and leading advocate of Java technology, announced it is continuing its ongoing investment in open source and the AJAX application model by joining the OpenAJAX Alliance, as well as the Dojo Foundation. Sun plans to actively participate in these two communities to help drive open standards for AJAX programming and increase interoperability across AJAX technologies. As part of the OpenAJAX Alliance, Sun will collaborate with over 30 other member companies and organizations to identify and consolidate best practices, reach a consensus on programming models around a reference implementation for tools interoperability and generate wider AJAX adoption throughout the industry. Sun is also a new sponsor of the prestigious Dojo Foundation and will participate in the Dojo Toolkit project. The Dojo Foundation is a non-profit organization for JavaScript programming and the Dojo Toolkit is an open source JavaScript toolkit for making professional web development faster and easier. As part of the Dojo Toolkit project, Sun will be contributing AJAX widgets, helping with internationalization efforts and refining documentation. Greg Murray, Sun's AJAX Architect, will be one of the people representing Sun as a member of the Dojo Foundation. "We're looking forward to Sun's involvement in helping to mature the Toolkit. Sun's support of the Dojo Foundation, inclusion of Rhino in the upcoming Java Platform Standard Edition 6 and recent release of Project Phobos underline a commitment to a better future for both users and developers," said Alex Russell, current president of the Dojo Foundation. In addition to joining these two communities, Sun announced a preview of a new plug-in for the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment to support the jMaki framework, which will help to improve developer productivity. Project jMaki, its Web site, is an open source JavaScript wrapper framework for the Java platform. Sun also recently launched two new AJAX web portals: http://developers.sun.com/ajax and the JAVA Web site as well as several enhanced Sun BluePrints AJAX-enabled JavaServer Faces components for the highly touted Sun Java Studio Creator development environment.