Sun Signs On With OpenAJAX Alliance and Dojo Foundation

Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) will continue its ongoing investment in open source and the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) application model by joining the OpenAJAX Alliance and Dojo Foundation, the company said.

Sun intends to drive open standards for AJAX programming and increase interoperability across AJAX technologies through its participation in the two communities.

Tools for Professional Web Developers

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's sponsorship of the Dojo Foundation will involve its participation 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 intended to make professional Web development faster and easier.

As part of the Toolkit project, Sun will be contributing AJAX widgets, assisting the foundation's 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.

New NetBeans Plug-In

"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, the foundation's president.

Sun also announced a preview of a new plug-in for the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment to support Project jMaki, an open source JavaScript wrapper framework for the Java platform.

Additionally, Sun launched this week two new AJAX Web portals -- developers.sun.com and java.sun.com -- as well as several enhanced components for the Sun Java Studio Creator development environment.