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)

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)

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)

Call for Feedback on OpenAjax Conformance and OpenAjax Registry

The OpenAjax Alliance is requesting industry feedback on two companion initiatives, OpenAjax Conformance and the OpenAjax Registry, which have been under development for the past year. The term OpenAjax Conformance is shorthand for the set of conformance requirements that OpenAjax Alliance places on Ajax technologies, products, and applications to promote interoperability. Version 1 of OpenAjax Conformance defines 10 specific conformance requirements on Ajax runtime libraries. An AJAX runtime library that meets these conformance requirements will allow Web developers to use that... (more)

AJAX and Mashup Security

This article provides an introduction to some of the security threats associated with AJAX technologies, particularly when used within mashup scenarios, and then offers a list of recommended best practices. Understanding the Same-Origin Policy One of the foundations of Web security is the "same-origin" policy, which is widely implemented by Web browsers, including the most popular ones (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera). Browsers implement the same-origin policy as a protection mechanism in order to isolate Web applications coming from different domains, under t... (more)