Sun to shine on AJAX
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems will shine more light on accommodations for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) in the Java realm at the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif. next week. Featured on Sun's agenda are the latest details on Project jMaki and Project Phobos, which are two open source efforts. The company also will provide an update on the future of Sun's JavaServer Faces (JSF) component model for Web application development, said Sun's Greg Murray, AJAX architect with the company and the project lead for jMaki. Sun's AJAX efforts focus on making JavaScript more available to Java developers, Murray said. "The problem is, people are afraid of JavaScript," he said. "If we want to keep Java relevant, we have to support this newer programming model [scripting]," Murray said. Web 2.0 and AJAX are very important to Sun, Murray said. The next version of Java, Java Standard Edition 6, will support JavaScript and is expected some time in 2007. Sun's accommodations with JavaScript will make AJAX simpler, said analyst Rikki Kirzner, CEO of Centennial Global Research. "You should be able to make AJAX simpler than it is," she said. AJAX currently lacks accommodations with Java, according to Kirzner.Â  "AJAX is a way to add richness to 3GL code, to any code, and Java doesn't readily embrace it," Kirzner said. The jMaki project enables Java developers to use JavaScript in Java applications as either a JSP (Java Server Pages) tag library or a JSF component. "It's a way of wrapping some of the existing JavaScript frameworks out there and exposing them to Java developers," Murray said. Developers can access Dojo and other frameworks.Â  A Dojo widget could be included in a page, for example. "Basically, jMaki will generate all the JavaScript, everything necessary to put that in the page for you," Murray said. A beta release of jMaki is planned for release in November. "We've been working away just to polish the edges," said Murray. A general release is expected in January or February 2007. Phobos is a way to script server-side code in JavaScript, rather than write a JSP page or a servlet, Murray said. The technology is planned for release early next year. Sun anticipates making jMaki and Phobos add-ons to the Java Enterprise Edition 5 platform. The future of JSF, meanwhile, involves an upgrade being called Project Dynamic Faces or JSF 2.0. This version will extend the component model for server-side components to better support AJAX, Murray said. This release is driven by feedback from users who seek AJAX functionality but want a strict programming model for the server, which JSF provides, Murray said. Dynamic Faces has been available in an early access release since the May timeframe.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. will offer utility computing services priced at less than a dollar per node per hour, it announced Tuesday.
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Microsoft&#39;s (Quote, Chart) dominance on the desktop may turn out to be Sun Microsystems&#39; (Quote, Chart) gain in the end. A letter to Sun Microsystems&#39; COO Jonathan Schwartz by the European Commission (EC) this
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Tiny, sensor-driven devices exposed A brainchild of Sun Microsystems' research wing, the Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) platform code is now open to Java developers at large.â¦
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Sun Microsystems and Microsoft next month plan to reveal the work they have been doing to make their products interoperable, a Sun executive said yesterday.
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Sun Microsystems on Monday was to unveil the latest version of its flagship computer operating system, Solaris. It also intended to offer a free version of the program to make it more attractive to corporate and academic users.
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(InfoWorld) - Dynamic scripting languages, a popular choice for Web application development, will be a top priority for the Eclipse Foundation at the EclipseCon conference, which begins Monday in Santa Clara, Calif. The open source tools organization will update two projects pertaining to AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and it will revise the DLTK (Dynamic Languages Toolkit), which features frameworks and platforms to make it easier to use scripting languages such as Tcl (Tool Command Language), Python, and Ruby. Eclipse's ATF (AJAX Toolkit Framework), with features for editing, compiling, and debugging AJAX applications, is being fitted with support for the script.aculo.us AJAX framework, Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse executive director, said. This will be done with release 0.2 of ATF at the conference. ATF already supports the Dojo, Open Rico, and Zimbra AJAX frameworks. These frameworks enable interactivity in the browser. "The challenge to date around tooling for AJAX has been dealing with these different frameworks," Milinkovich said. Eclipse with ATF can help consolidate the high volume of AJAX frameworks, which has impeded enterprise support for AJAX because of fragmentation, said Jeffrey Hammond, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "There's 130 frameworks out there. What we need is 10 or less," Hammond said. While ATF enables the building of tools to interact with AJAX frameworks, it also features tools of its own, such as those for profiling and debugging. Currently, ATF supports the Firefox browser only, but there are plans to enable it to work with other browsers, including Internet Explorer. Also, Eclipse will debut release 0.1 of RAP (Rich AJAX Platform), which provides a runtime for AJAX applications. Developers can build applications in Java, then decide whether to deploy them in the browser via RAP or on the client. A 1.0 release of RAP is planned for June. "You write your Java [code] once and then you can make your deployment decision later, based on what the customer or what your client wants to do," Hammond said. With the 0.7 release of DLTK, Eclipse will support Tcl. Version 1.0 of DLTK, due in June, will back Ruby and Python. DLTK provides facilities to build IDEs for scripting languages. Eclipse, with its open source tools, enables commercial companies to develop commercial products that leverage base Eclipse technologies.Â
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(InfoWorld) - 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 in Santa Clara, Calif., on Wednesday 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? So you can have one personâs UI widget working with your UI widget, and these are all in JavaScript. And each and every one of the toolkits today, actually, expects to own the whole page; so theyâre going to basically take control, and expect to; then, when you leave their page, they lose control. Well, what really is going to have to happen is, you may like someoneâs Accordion control from one toolkit and want to use it, for example, with Tibcoâs. So one of the things which we started working on was something called OpenAjax Hub inside of OpenAjax, which is [aimed at allowing that interoperability], and thatâs going to be an open source plan. So [those were] the reasons why we started OpenAjax. Now, when you start looking at the bigger picture here and at what IBM is doing in this space, [you'll see that it] is in parallel to starting OpenAjax; what we did [at IBM] is, we started a project inside IBM to work on trying to bring down the level of complexity of writing and debugging applications, AJAX applications in particular. And the way we did it was, we built a piece of code called the AJAX Tooling Framework which went on top of Eclipse, which is the core foundation for tooling that we are using, and we can demo the AJAX Tooling Framework with the whole idea behind it [being] to bring down that level of not only complexity but also to allow someone to write a lot more AJAX code in a much shorter amount of time and get it published faster. InfoWorld: What about Microsoft -- which has its AJAX technology, Atlas -- not being a part of OpenAjax? Are there any more overtures being made? Are they just going to sit on the sidelines like they seem to do with other industry initiatives, like Eclipse? Whatâs going on there with Microsoft? Boloker: I actually just spoke with Microsoft yesterday about joining OpenAjax, and theyâve taken back the details and are thinking about it, and theyâll get back to us. InfoWorld: What do you think the impact is of Microsoft not participating? You have this massive PC software company, and theyâre not participating. Do you think it's detrimental for them to not participate, or does it not make a difference? Boloker: Well it makes a difference because Iâd actually like to have them at the table. They have some very, very skilled developers, and theyâve thought about the area a lot, just as Tibco has and IBM has and JackBe has and others. It would be actually great if we actually can get everyone to the table, and Iâm really hoping that we can do it. InfoWorld: Do you think you will? Boloker: Optimistic. InfoWorld: But they have not made any commitments to joining at this point? Boloker: None. Theyâre thinking about it at this point. InfoWorld: Are there any other major companies on the sidelines? I canât think of any right now. Boloker: Thereâs plenty of people that are in discussions with us, and those people in discussions with us are folks like Apple. Letâs see, who else would be in it? Weâre looking at Cisco as another. Cisco [is not] core to the Web piece of this. The other companies are mostly in Asia. InfoWorld: What about the issues of security around AJAX? Apparently there are a lot of them. What are you doing about that? Boloker: Security around AJAX is actually security around the Web. So thereâs many sets of issues here, and one of the things which weâre actually going to cover inside of OpenAjax is a whole discussion on security, at the meeting at the end of the week. And one of the topics is not only from a Web standpoint of cross-app scripting, which has been a problem in the Web for many, many years, when you have cross-application scripting between servers. But this whole concept of when youâre doing mashups, if youâre doing mashups all within your establishment or customer shop or you have trusted parties, mashups are secure. Itâs when you do unsecure mashups between, say, myself and someone I donât really know; that other personâs JavaScript could be misformed, or [it could] try to take control of my machine. And this is really where a question of needing to do some technology work between ourselves, the companies, as well as maybe even in the W3C to look at [the question], How do I basically bring an access list to give someone approval to use the mashup or not to use the mashup? InfoWorld: Apparently there are issues with inexperienced developers, there are issues with the cross-site scripting, there are issues with Web services. Even Jesse James Garrett who founded the term AJAX said there are a lot of issues and weâre going to have to almost patch them one by one. So how can people rely on AJAX if itâs got all these security issues? I talked to one AJAXWorld attendee yesterday, and she said she wasnât using AJAX yet, but the one thing she knew was that it apparently had a lot of security concerns. Boloker: So there are security concerns. Actually, if you look at the security concerns you have when doing Web services, there actually was work done for Web services in the area of WS-Security. A lot of folks who are looking at this are looking at it for the first time. Well, the folks that actually have looked at service-oriented architecture said, "Well, if Iâm actually going to start calling something, I want to, No. 1, ensure that I can call the resource, and then if I can call the resource that Iâm actually entitled to, go deeper and actually access the data." The second piece of this is this cross-site scripting; this has been a known problem in the Web, and itâs a server-side problem that people have been dealing with. Now, the other issues that you start looking at in the area of mashups, again, this is -- youâre absolutely correct. You have people that are writing JavaScript that donât really know how to write it, and if you create a mashup, you could end up with a serious problem. Now, if you look at the mashups that have been created up to this point, theyâve been done by very highly skilled and very knowledgeable Web programmers who know what theyâre doing. Now, one of the reasons why we founded OpenAjax was this exact problem was when Scott [Dietzen, CTO of Zimbra, who helped co-found OpenAjax,] and I looked at this problem in late 2005, we pretty much decided that the number of problems that would be confronting people, youâd probably find one in 40 developers actually having all of the right capabilities to actually write good AJAX and secure AJAX. InfoWorld: So what are you going to do? Boloker: The first thing we started doing is weâre attacking the problem not one at a time, weâre doing it in multiple fronts. The first thing was, How do we basically build AJAX, and how do we debug AJAX? And how do we see whatâs going from the client side of this to the server? And thatâs what IBM was working on, and Bob [Goodman, a senior programmer at IBM,] was doing with the AJAX Tooling Framework. The second side of this is that we needed to get the knowledge out about what are the issues. You donât want to scare people away, but at the same token, you need to basically educate them. And this, again, was part of this whole side of what OpenAJAX was about. The third side of this is, How do you then look at it from an industry standpoint of coming out with the best practices? So this is a document that people [would] write to give to AJAX programmers. And then the fourth thing is to look for the technology side of it. How can we basically start securing the technology? And that work is under way right now. And [while] there are no great answers at this exact second, thereâs a very good understanding of the problem, and people are discussing whatâs the right way to do it. InfoWorld: What is the attraction of AJAX? Boloker: AJAX enables you in a Web browser to actually have some of the same qualities of an interaction that you used to have only in a fat client setting. InfoWorld: How does it do that? Boloker: Well, what happens is, AJAX is actually, if you want to look at a set of standards that were [to] form a programming model, and those standards start off with DHTML and JavaScript and XML and thereâs Cascading Style Sheets, thereâs Web services, thereâs all of these things that are falling into this, and each and every one of these is a standard. And the use of them all together creates a toolkit. And today there are probably 200-some-odd toolkits, between closed source and open source, and each of the toolkits does things very differently. So the first thing you have to worry about is, How does it work within Firefox? How does it work within Internet Explorer? These are all different. And then, once you get beyond [that], how do I get it render effectively? Then you can start looking at, well, What are the qualities of the AJAX implementation? Can I do drag-and-drops? Can you do cut and paste, for example, from the browser and move it somewhere else? But the key thing you start looking at is, if you [look at] a great example of an AJAX application, and there are many on the Web today, [there] is one that started off with the folks from a company acquired by Yahoo called Oddpost. And the Yahoo Beta Mail actually uses Oddpost, some of the core pieces. â¦ Thereâs a group of developers that did very early work on [finding] how do I get a very, very high-quality Outlook-type mail client into a browser? And they basically were acquired by Yahoo and became Beta Mail. And if you look at what goes on inside Yahoo Mail, the first thing thatâs so apparent to you is you have the full services of a drag-and-drop all within the browser. The second thing you start looking at is the setting that youâre having is they allow you to do RSS feeds. You can look at RSS and Atom feeds. I mean, theyâre just one example. InfoWorld: Before AJAX, or theoretically before AJAX, you had Flash. Do you see Flash as a competitor, as a complementary? It just seems like it is kind of a competitive technology even if Adobe says itâs not. Boloker: I was going to tell you to ask Adobe what their opinion was. Flash is yet another example of a Web-based technology, and there are reasons why customers might want to use Flash to have an environment, a full environment, and you know there are reasons why people might want to do something just purely in DHTML and JavaScript. I mean the first obvious reason is DHTML and JavaScript [are] installed on everyone elseâs desktop today and is immediately used, whereas Flash was a plug-in. Now, that plug-in happens to be pretty much on most peopleâs machines. InfoWorld: AJAX is a technique. Is there going to be an AJAX 2.0, 3.0? Do you see an evolution of it, or is it just that this is the technique for doing something and if you get too far away from it, then itâs not AJAX anymore? Boloker: Well, itâs a programming paradigm, and with all programming paradigms, whether itâs AJAX 2.0 or AJAX 3.0, it started off as AJAX. And itâll always be AJAX. And what youâre going to do is learn, as an industry weâre all going to learn nuances to do something easier or make it much more secure, the points you brought up before. InfoWorld: So OpenAjax is not going to come out with the next version of AJAX, right? Boloker: No, OpenAjax is definitely not going to come out with another version of AJAX. OpenAjax is really going to be looking at [this] from a full industry partnership on how to move AJAX forward. Now, one might say that as we start looking at AJAX Hub and things like that, that people might say that, well, thatâs another version of AJAX. But in reality itâs the same version of AJAX. Weâre just working to build it out. InfoWorld: Any final thoughts that you want to add? Boloker: I think my only final words really come back to, Iâve been working in technology for many years, and as with any technology thatâs coming on the scenes, there are initially problems. Some of the problems have to do with, first of all, education of the audience, and the second thing has to do always with security, manageability, scalability, and things like that. Our friends from Google proved that AJAX can scale through Google Maps. For that matter, in a lot of cases I think that theyâve proved that you can run a pretty secure shop with AJAX. There are security problems that the industry.
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Joshua Eichorn is back today with the answers to the questions as posed by the readers of his blog previously.   Your AJAX answers from my AJAX questions post are below, I hope everyone finds them helpful.   The questions answered include:  How can I find out whether a connection is broken? Why would you want to use HTML_AJAX when there are far better tools for the job, pure javascript solutions such as prototype or jquery? What is the best way to 'degrade' a website when Javascript/XMLHttpRequest support is disabled? When utilizing an AJAX API such as Google Maps, how do you execute embedded Javascript commands in a page generated on-the-fly?    ...as well as a few more. Where appropriate, he also includes code to help illustrate his point.
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Sun Microsystems SUNW is expected to release a new version of its operating system today - a big part of the struggling computer maker&#39;s plan to save itself.
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Winter '07 will feature a new user interface based on Ajax, a group of software development tools and standards that help create interactive Web applications.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. today is expected to unveil the much-awaited âfreeâ version of its Operating System, Solaris 10, which the company is betting on to help neutralize the open-source threat and increase profitability.
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That appears to be the flag Sun Microsystems will be waving today as it officially unveils Solaris 10 (even though the OS won&#39;t actually ship until January).
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Company says the software lets developers create and deploy AJAX applications that look and feel like desktop GUIs.
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The suspense is finally over. On November 15, Sun Microsystems will finally launch its much-anticipated Solaris 10 Unix operating system for UltraSparc, Sparc64, and x86 platforms.
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(InfoWorld) - Even if text editors have been prominent in AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development, developers nonetheless would benefit from an IDE, panelists agreed at the EclipseCon 2007 conference on Wednesday. In a session entitled, "What Does Eclipse Need to Do to Become the IDE for AJAX?", panelists from companies such as IBM and Nexaweb said AJAX could use an IDE and that AJAX could benefit from Eclipse technologies. "I remember when Java first came out and all I used was a text editor," said panelist Robert Goodman, senior programmer at IBM. He said he did not like the first Java IDEs. But now, he could not go back to writing Java without one. "I think that's eventually what you'll get on JavaScript," Goodman said. Eclipse's own AJAX-related projects include the AJAX Toolkit Framework, for editing, compiling and debugging AJAX applications, and Rich AJAX Platform, serving as a runtime for AJAX applications. Panelists also cited issues in AJAX development. Detailing his own experience with AJAX complexity, panelist Coach Wei, CTO at Nexaweb, told of writing an AJAX application and running into trouble. Eventually, he found a problem related to a CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file.Â  JavaScript now is being used to write large libraries, which was not anticipated, according to Goodman. "We haven't proven yet that you can really do this in JavaScript," Goodman said. Panelists noted that although AJAX can be difficult, it is still the way to go for desktop interaction in Web applications. "Definitely, the reason to do AJAX is for those sexy, dynamic Web apps," said Eric Clayberg, senior vice president of product development at Instantiations. Panelists supported consolidation in the area of AJAX runtimes, noting the existence of runtimes such as Dojo. An audience member emphasized that rather than devising new technologies, it may be a good idea to leverage what has already been done. "They should be standing on the shoulders of giants," said Hal Hildebrand, an architect in Oracle's Java platform group, after the session. AJAX is a new interface technology and lots of work already has been done in this area, he said. Another audience member, Kyle Shank, developer of the RadRails IDE for Ruby on Rails, cautioned against relying on a single framework for AJAX. "I would caution everyone who's interested in AJAX to not depend on one framework and actually write your apps in a way that [they] don't depend on one framework," Shank said. RadRails was built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Companies represented on the panel, such as Aptana, Instantiations, and Nexaweb, offer tools for AJAX developers. Also on Wednesday, EclipseCon featured a session where attendees could air gripes about Eclipse. Attendees expressed desires for improvements such as a native installer, which would tailor installations of Eclipse to suit the target platform. Nested projects support, enabling projects to be maintained within other projects, also got a thumbs-up. Improvements to Eclipse dialog capabilities and the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework also were suggested. Scripting enhancements were requested as well, as was stronger support for the Subversion version control system. Others in the audience noted that work is being done in areas such as scripting. The Eclipse Monkey project is a dynamic scripting tool for automating routine programming tasks. One attendee said it is possible to create nested projects within Eclipse but there is no wizard for automating this function.
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InfoWorld - Sun is expected to announce next week that it will make the Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) device platform available via open source, but a user expressed concerns about Sun's commitment to the technology.