News
OpenAjax Alliance Moves Into Secure Mashups, Mobile Integration
- By Becky Nagel
- March 20, 2008
The OpenAjax Alliance -- a group of vendors, users and developers supporting the use of AJAX in open projects -- on Monday announced that it has two new areas of focus: secure mashups and mobile-appliance application integration.
Consumer-based AJAX applications have made in-roads to the enterprise, and the OpenAjax Alliance is looking for a secure way to enable those technologies. "[This will help] extend the reach of AJAX from the consumer space into the enterprise by introducing the ability to secure mashups as well as use any existing widgets or gadgets in an AJAX application," OpenAJAX Alliance Steering Committee Chairman David Boloker said in a press release announcing the news.
One alliance project that will enable this security is OpenAjax Hub 1.1, which will include IBM's just-announced SMash technology. The alliance is developing a "commercial-ready open source JavaScript reference implementation" of the Hub plus formal specifications for APIs. A first draft of the specification can be found here. IBM, a founding member of the alliance, donated the SMash technology to the organization earlier this month.
Another initiative, OpenAjax Metadata, will help establish industry standards for XML metadata in libraries and widgets, making interoperability easier. A draft of this specification can be found here.
The third initiative announced this week, Mobile AJAX, is designed to increase the use and usability of the platform on mobile devices.
"In order to deliver tomorrow's innovative mobile applications, the industry needs to standardize its approach to allowing the Web Runtime to use mobile device services, such as current location, messaging services, address book and connection status," commented the alliance's Mobile Task Force Co-Chair Brad Sipes, CTO and vice president of Ikivo, in the same release.
For more information on all of these projects, go to the OpenAjax Alliance's site here.