OpenAjax Alliance is very pleased to see the progress by one of its industry partner organizations, the OMTP, with its BONDI initiative.

BONDI provides industry standard APIs to access mobile device services, such as geolocation, address book, email, SMS, camera and the phone dialer. BONDI also defines a security manager architecture and a standard policy XML file format. The primary goals with BONDI are threefold: (1) enable next-generation rich mobile applications by allowing the Web Runtime (i.e., Ajax) to access the same APIs that are available to compiled languages such as C and Java, (2) ensure that security and privacy concerns are addressed, (3) package the APIs in the form of an industry standard and promote adoption of the standard such that developers will not have to write separate content for different mobile platforms. The APIs defined by BONDI target both Web pages and mobile widgets, particularly widgets that conform to the emerging W3C Widgets standard.

OpenAjax Alliance salutes the efforts and accomplishments to date with the BONDI specs and open source, along with the W3C’s efforts with its Widgets spec. The combination of these two initiatives promise to transform the mobile industry.

In the past, OpenAjax Alliance has helped the BONDI initiative with OpenAjax early work (Spring 2008) on use cases and requirements and subsequent work on a Mobile Device API Style Guide.

Recently (Feb-Mar 2009), OpenAjax Alliance has assembled Ajax industry leaders to review the BONDI 1.0 Release Candidate specifications and collect feedback on the OpenAjax Alliance member wiki.