Jon Ferraiolo

Hard-nosed executives recognize that there are costs associated with any benefit. To convince today's upper-level decision makers to approve strategic investments, they need to hear more than phrases like "essential to the business," "the results are too unpredictable," and "yields intangible benefits." In the world of Web development, the move from HTML to AJAX-powered HTML can often be achieved at a relatively low cost, but there are both direct and indirect costs associated with AJAX that must be taken into account. A close analysis of these factors will enable business managers to make more well informed decisions when considering AJAX adoption in a particular application and across their organization. Let's look first at the expected benefits from AJAX. AJAX is all about ways to create a more interactive and productive connection between a user and a Web-based ... (more)

The OpenAjax Technology Vision: Accelerating Customer Success with AJAX

OpenAjax ­ Fulfilling AJAX's Promise One would think that an industry would slow down as it matures, but the Web has proven to be just the opposite. Innovations are happening at breakneck speed. Companies have to move faster than ever to keep up and survive. AJAX is clearly a case in point. The term "AJAX" was first mentioned publicly in February 2005 by Jesse James Garrett. But roughly 18 months later, we have hundreds of companies delivering AJAX products, dozens of AJAX open source projects, and nearly everyone in the industry planning to adopt AJAX techniques as part of their ... (more)

Introducing OpenAjax Hub 1.0

The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using AJAX that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable AJAX-based Web technologies. This article introduces the alliance's first major technical product, OpenAjax Hub 1.0. The OpenAjax Hub is a set of standard JavaScript that, when included with an AJAX-powered Web application, promotes the ability for multiple AJAX toolkits to work together on the same page. The central feature of the OpenAjax Hub is its publish/subscribe event manager (the "pub/sub manage... (more)

Final Voting Phase on OpenAjax Browser Wishlist

The OpenAjax Alliance is developing an AJAX industry wishlist for future browsers, using a dedicated wiki. The feature list now lists 37 separate feature requests, covering a wide range of technology areas, such as security, Comet, multimedia, CSS, interactivity, and performance. The goal is to inform the browser vendors about what the Ajax developer community feels are most important for the next round of browsers (i.e., FF4, IE9, Safari4, and Opera10) and to provide supplemental details relative to the feature requests. The initiative is now in its final voting phase, and the ... (more)

Good News for AJAX – The Browser Wars Are Back!

After years of dominance by a single browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), and few advances within IE, the world has changed. There is now healthy competition among multiple browsers over standards compliance, AJAX features, AJAX performance and trustworthy computing. The competition is reaching beyond the desktop to include the emerging world of mobile browsing. This healthy competition will result in important new capabilities within AJAX toolkits and will help accelerate the adoption of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The Era of the Single Browser Is Over For m... (more)