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 library conveniently within a given Web page with other OpenAjax Conformant libraries.
OpenAjax Conformance provides the following benefits to IT managers and the AJAX developer community:
- Seamless integration of multiple AJAX products and technologies within the same Web application, particularly with applications that use mashup techniques
- Greater certainty about product choices, where OpenAjax Conformance plays a similar role in the AJAX community as the Good Housekeeping Seal does with consumer products
- Lower training costs, lower development costs, and faster delivery of Web 2.0 innovations due to industry adoption of common approaches that build from OpenAjax standards
- Interchangeability of OpenAjax Conformant products, such that customers can choose among multiple vendors (and change vendors in the future)
OpenAjax Conformance defines three conformance levels. Full Conformance is for AJAX products that have sufficiently strong Ajax interoperability characteristics that there is high expectation that the given product can be used successfully and conveniently with other Ajax products as part of the same AJAX development task. Configurable Conformance is for AJAX products that support all of the same strong interoperability characteristics as for Full Conformance, except not in their default configuration. Limited Conformance is for products that meet a particular subset of the conformance criteria, and therefore have taken important steps towards AJAX industry interoperability, but on the question of whether the given AJAX product can interoperate successfully and conveniently with other Ajax products, the answer is "it depends".
The OpenAjax Registry is a centralized, industry-wide AJAX registration authority managed by the Interoperability Working Group at OpenAjax Alliance. The Registry maintains an industry-wide list of AJAX runtime libraries and various characteristics of each library. For each library, the Registry lists:
- JavaScript globals
- runtime extensions (both JavaScript and DOM)
- markup extensions (e.g., custom elements, attributes or CSS class names)
These two technologies have now entered a public review phase that ends on June 30, 2008. Feedback can come in various forms, such as email to public@openajax.org, or comments posted on various industry blogs. After the public review phase ends, the members of OpenAjax Alliance will adjust the two specifications to take the feedback into account and then move the two specifications towards version 1.0 completion and approval.