OpenSocial/OpenAjax Update and other OpenAjax news

Blogged by: Jon Ferraiolo on December 19, 2009 at 11:17 am

This post summarizes the following recent activity at OpenAjax Alliance:

  • OpenSocial/OpenAjax integration: detailed proposals and proof-of-concept implementation
  • Major products ship with OpenAjax Hub 2.0
  • OpenAjax Hub 2.0.1: removes clicking noise on IE6 and IE7
  • OpenAjax Metadata: detailed editorial review complete
  • Accessibility Task Force: major progress on ARIA tools and best practices
  • Version 2 of OpenAjax Browser Wishlist
  • OpenAjax Registry

OpenSocial/OpenAjax integration: detailed proposals and proof-of-concept implementation

Since September, 2009, various individuals who are in the Interoperability WG have been participating in fast-track coordination work with OpenSocial Foundation to define a new “pubsub” feature in OpenSocial Gadgets that builds upon various technologies from OpenAjax Alliance, particularly OpenAjax Hub 2.0. The latest proposals for how to integrate OpenAjax pubsub into OpenSocial Gadgets are captured on the following OpenSocial wiki page:

Howard Weingram of TIBCO has already produced a proof-of-concept implementation in which he pulled down the latest Apache Shindig open source and the latest OpenAjax Hub open source, and made relatively minor changes and succeeded in getting the two technologies to work together. This proof-of-concept was an important milestone because the OpenSocial process requires a working implementation before spec change proposals will be considered.

In early 2010, we will be working with OpenSocial Foundation on formal specification proposals and open source contributions in this area, with the goal that OpenAjax-compatible pubsub will be an official Gadgets feature with the 1.1 release of Gadgets.

Major products ship with OpenAjax Hub 2.0

OpenAjax Hub 2.0 was approved in July 2009 and already IBM and TIBCO have announced major products that include Hub 2.0 inside. IBM shipped Mashup Center 2.0, where OpenAjax Hub 2.0 provides component isolation capabilities:

IBM will be rolling out updates to other software products using OAHub throughout 2010.

TIBCO PageBus 2.0 bundles and extends OAHub 2.0 (among other things, PageBus adds event caching and origin-based policy management):

Various TIBCO products — for example, BPM products and RIA tools — already use the OpenAjax Hub. More TIBCO products will add Hub-based mash-up technology in their upcoming releases.

OpenAjax Hub 2.0.1: removes clicking noise on IE6 and IE7

A version 2.0.1 update to the open source reference implementation for OpenAjax Hub 2.0 is almost complete. This update provides updated messaging transport logic for IE6 and IE7 that remove the clicking noises that occurred on those two browsers when messages are passed between sandboxed widgets. The 2.0.1 open source update also includes significant cleanups that have resulted in reduced code size. These cleanups are a major step towards allowing the future integration (and minimized redundancy) between OpenSocial Gadgets and OpenAjax Hub. Version 2.0.1 coding is complete and runs successfully against the comprehensive test suite across all target browsers. The update should be finalized in early 2010.

OpenAjax Metadata: detailed editorial review complete

OpenAjax Metadata defines industry standard XML for documenting the widgets and APIs found in Ajax libraries to allow interoperable plug-and-play between Ajax toolkits and Ajax IDEs.

The IDE WG has completed a word-by-word editorial review of the entire OpenAjax Metadata 1.0 Specification. A few editorial cleanup tasks remain, and then the specification will be submitted for member approval, probably right away in early 2010.

Accessibility Task Force: major progress on ARIA tools and best practices

The Accessiblity Task Force has made major progress in 2009 on important issues around how to improve the tools available to web application developers to ensure that their applications have good accessibility support.

The goals of the Accessibility TF are to (a) develop a standard set of accessibility validation rules, geared toward meeting compliance to WCAG 2 using WAI-ARIA and WAI-ARIA Best Practices, (b) develop best practices for reporting accessibility compliance by accessibility test tools, and (c) develop IDE best practices to assist developers to produce Accessible RIAs. Here are some of the key wiki pages that show progress to date:

These documents are being developed in collaboration with implementation efforts that target Eclipse and Firefox/Firebug:

Version 2 of OpenAjax Browser Wishlist

Preparation work is underway on the second version of the OpenAjax Browser Wishlist. The main page for the initiative is at:

  • /runtime/wiki/2009_Feature_Requests_Summary_Page

We strongly encourage the members of OpenAjax Alliance to help out with this browser wishlist by adding features, providing detailed information on existing features, and offering their opinions about the importance of particular features. With this new wishlist, a large percentage of the features listed represent new features underway as part of the HTML5 effort at the W3C (HTML WG, CSS WG, WebApps WG, etc.). To some extent, the browser wishlist will represent the Ajax community telling browser vendors which features from HTML5 are most critical to deliver right away.

We had hoped to complete the wishlist in 2009, but the initiative leaders did not have the bandwidth to complete the preparations before the end of the year. Therefore, the wishlist is likely to be announced in early 2010, with various calls to the general Ajax community (including non-members) to vote on which features are most important to see in future browsers.

OpenAjax Registry

In 2009, personally, I haven’t had bandwidth to create initial versions of the OpenAjax Registry, which the alliance decided should become a self-service web application that members and non-members could use to document the JavaScript globals, HTML attributes, CSS classes, and pubsub topics (and payload types) that various products use in the industry in order to maximize interoperability and minimize naming collisions. We still hope to make the Registry happen soon. It shouldn’t be that much work and will provide value to the industry once completed.

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