I am proud to announce that the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 Specification [1] has been approved by the Interoperability Working Group, the members, and the OpenAjax Alliance Steering Committee. This represents the first approved Specification for OpenAjax Alliance per the terms of the OpenAjax Alliance Members Agreement. [2] and is therefore an important milestone for the alliance.

We have been working on Hub 1.0 for about 18 months, developing the spec [1], developing an open source reference implementation [3] and an open source test suite [3], and have verified our work with two major interoperability events, [4] and [5]. In the second interoperability event, the Hub was used to exchange messages among 19 different Ajax toolkits, including most of the toolkits with the highest market share.

OpenAjax Hub provides 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 manager”), which enables loose assembly and integration of Ajax components. With the pub/sub manager, one Ajax component can publish (i.e., broadcast) an event to which other Ajax components can subscribe, thereby allowing these components to communicate with each other through the Hub, which acts as an intermediary message bus. The umbrella use case for the OpenAjax Hub is the set of scenarios in which an Ajax developer needs to deploy a single application that uses multiple Ajax libraries simultaneously.

Here are some links:

[1] Final approved specification: /member/wiki/OpenAjax_Hub_Specification_v10
[2] Members Agreement: /process/OpenAjax%20Members%20Agreement%20Final%2020060816.pdf
[3] Open source reference implementation and test suite: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openajaxallianc
[4] First InteropFest: /member/wiki/InteropFest_2007_March
[5] Second InteropFest: /member/wiki/InteropFest_1.0

The next phase is OpenAjax Hub 1.1, which will add secure mashup support and client-server communications. We expect an initial draft specifications and open source to appear in the next few weeks.