With OpenAjax Hub 1.0 on the verge of completion, the members of OpenAjax Alliance have begun the planning process for OpenAjax Hub 1.1. No decisions have been made, but recent discussion has centered on extending the Hub 1.0’s publish/subscribe mechanisms. Whereas OpenAjax Hub 1.0 focuses on publish/subscribe within a single browser frame, we are looking at the following two feature areas for Hub 1.1: (1) extending the pub/sub engine to allow cross-frame pub/sub and client-server pub/sub (including Comet-style server push), (2) providing a framework for secure mashups. Some of the proposals submitted by members can be found on the Communications Hub Task Force wiki page. I wrote a strawman proposal for Hub 1.1 which has been reviewed to some extent, with feedback that there probably are simpler mechanisms than don’t require always have to establish a “room”. Several people are advocating that we do open source implementations to verify approaches and then the necessary APIs will become clear.

Another technical area that might be addressed either in parallel with Hub 1.1 or as part of Hub 1.1 are JavaScript name collisions. We had started work in this area with Hub 1.0, but decided to postpone that work from Hub 1.0. We are now looking at JavaScript name collisions again as we have resumed discussions about the OpenAjax Registry.