TIBCO’s AJAX toolkit now supports Firefox 1.5

• By Matt Stephens
• October 6, 2006

These days, super-friendly AJAX toolkits are two a penny (as we say in England). But one of these toolkits, General Interface, has something of a mature pedigree – especially for what is essentially a Web 2.0 product. The toolkit was first released back in 2001, predating the AJAX acronym, and definitely predating “Web 2.0”. A few years later, GI was bought by TIBCO.

In essence, GI is a solidly engineered set of JavaScript libraries and development tools. Like something from an MC Escher picture, the tools themselves were also created using GI.

GI has traditionally been an Internet Explorer-only creature, which made sense back in 2001. However, arguably the main benefit of an AJAX toolkit these days is that it removes the pain of cross-browser scripting (at least in theory). So with the “mainstream any day now, you just wait, I’ll show them, so I will!” ascendancy of Firefox, the fact that GI supported only one browser has been something of a limitation. You could probably ascertain from the awkward past-tense of that last sentence that this is no longer the case. (The title of this blog entry is rather a giveaway too, of course).

So, fast forward to now, and the snappily titled TIBCO General Interface™ Professional Edition v3.2 has entered its Beta 2 testing phase. And, importantly, this new version of GI will work in Firefox 1.5. There’s also SVG charting support for Firefox; and a new Matrix control supporting lists, grids, trees, and combinations of those (tree-lists, tree-grids).

The new release also offers an open source BSD license option. During the beta period, it’s actually a closed-source, obfuscated, compressed-source option. But the curtain will be lifted from the source once the software is released into the wild.