OpenAjax Alliances announced some of the participants in the 2008 InteropFest within a press release that was picked up various industry publications, who wrote follow-on articles. Here are links to the press release and some early press coverage:

• Press release
• Application Development Trends
• eWeek
• Infoworld
• Trading Partners

The InteropFest targeted two main Ajax development scenarios:

• Ajax developer tools (IDE) – The key OpenAjax technology is OpenAjax Metadata, which defines an industry standard XML format for describing the JavaScript APIs and widgets in an Ajax library. This standard will allow developer tools to support a single format (i.e., OpenAjax Metadata) and automatically gain support for countless Ajax toolkit, which is a great improvement over the one-off tool-to-toolkit situation that exists in today’s world.
• Ajax mashups – OpenAjax Alliance provides two technologies for mashups. OpenAjax Hub 1.1 provides an open source secure mashup runtime that isolates 3rd party widgets into secure sandboxes (usually leveraging IFRAMEs), with a mediated message bus to control which messages go between which widgets. OpenAjax Metadata also defines a “mashable widget” standard that extends OpenAjax’s widget format to provide the extra metadata and APIs needed by mashup tools.

With today’s announcement, multiple vendors have implemented key parts of OpenAjax Metadata. Developer tools from Adobe, Aptana, Eclipse Foundation, and IBM’s Rational software division consume OpenAjax Metadata and various popular Ajax libraries and widgets have been made available in the OpenAjax formats.

Vendors participating in mashup-related interoperability include Google, IBM, Nexaweb, SAP and TIBCO. The members of OpenAjax Alliance have completed a reference implementation for both OpenAjax Hub 1.1 and OpenAjax Metadata.

One of the highlights of AJAXWorld today was when Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch, began his keynote at AJAXWorld today by talking about how Dreamweaver CS4 was using the widget format from OpenAjax Metadata as the product’s native widget format, with demos of drag&drop of widgets from some popular toolkits onto the Dreamweaver canvas (e.g., I am pretty sure I saw Dojo and YUI widgets showing up in Dreamweaver, but the screen was a bit blurry).

We are happy about the great efforts from other organizations who have participated in the OpenAjax Hub 1.1 and Metadata interoperability efforts, which includes: Adobe, Aptana, the Dojo Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Google, IBM, ILOG, Lightstreamer, Nexaweb, ProgrammableWeb, SAP and TIBCO.