JonFerraiolo OpenAjax Conformance
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1 Introducing OpenAjax Conformance
"OpenAjax Conformance" is an umbrella term for the industry trust brand that is defined by OpenAjax Alliance. OpenAjax Alliance evangelizes this trust brand to all stakeholders in the industry in order to drive industry-wide interoperability and thereby promote customer success with Ajax technologies.
The term "OpenAjax Conformance" represents a well-defined set of conformance requirements that OpenAjax Alliance places on Ajax technologies, products, and applications. These requirements focus on a small number of simple but important aspects of Ajax usage, thereby providing the critical bits of Ajax interoperability that customers need, but in a manner that puts a small burden on Ajax suppliers while allowing them to continue to innovate and move forward with new technologies and products.
OpenAjax Alliance strongly encourages vendors (both commercial and open source) to promote the fact that their products are OpenAjax Conformant through marketing activities such as press releases and advertisements. As leading vendors claim OpenAjax Conformance, customers increasingly will demand OpenAjax Conformance from their vendors, which will pressure other vendors to be OpenAjax Conformant. As a result, customers realize long-term benefit because they are able to mix-and-match best-of-breed Ajax products due to interoperability gained from industry support for OpenAjax Alliance's various standards.
2 Industry benefits from OpenAjax Conformance
OpenAjax Conformance provides the following benefits to IT managers and the Ajax developer community:
- Seamless integration of multiple Ajax products and technologies within the same Web application, particularly with applications that use mashup techniques
- Greater certainty about product choices, where OpenAjax Conformance plays a similar role in the Ajax community as the Good Housekeeping Seal does with consumer products
- Lower training costs, lower development costs, and faster delivery of Web 2.0 innovations due to industry adoption of common approaches that build from OpenAjax standards
- Interchangeability of OpenAjax Conformant products, such that customers can choose among multiple vendors (and change vendors in the future)
3 Conformance claims, version numbers, and categories
The definition of OpenAjax Conformance will evolve over time as OpenAjax Alliance approves new Ajax industry standards issues and delivers updates to previously OpenAjax standards. Over time, OpenAjax Alliance will define new definitions of OpenAjax Alliance and assign a new version number to each updated definition. For example, "OpenAjax 1.0 Conformance" means that a product supports the 1.0 definition of OpenAjax Conformance, and sometime in the future we expect to define "OpenAjax 1.1 Conformance".
When an Ajax technology provider claims OpenAjax Conformance, it must identify which version of OpenAjax Conformance with which it is compatible. For example, the documentation might say: "This product is OpenAjax 1.0 Conformant".
The following represent acceptable ways of expressing OpenAjax Conformance within conformance claims:
- OpenAjax n.m Conformance
- OpenAjax n.m Conformant
OpenAjax 1.0 Conformance only defines conformance requirements on Ajax runtime libraries; therefore, only products that include an Ajax runtime library component can claim OpenAjax 1.0 Conformance. In the future, however, as new specifications are approved and published, OpenAjax Alliance is likely to have conformance requirements that pertain to other types of products. Therefore, in the future, there will be different sets of of conformance requirements on different categories of products.
4 What a product must do to claim OpenAjax Conformance
To claim OpenAjax Conformance at a particular version number for a particular category (e.g., Ajax runtime library), a product must support all relevant OpenAjax Conformance Requirements defined within all relevant OpenAjax specifications that apply to that version number and to that category.
To be OpenAjax 1.0 Conformant, a product must support all of the relevant OpenAjax Conformance Requirements found within the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 Specification.
5 No formal certification mechanisms
OpenAjax Alliance does not have the capacity to provide formal certification services or to police the industry. Because of the nature of some of the technologies involved, it is not possible for the the alliance to offer a comprehensive, fully automated test suite that can determine whether a particular product fulfills all of the relevant conformance requirements.
As a result, it is up to the vendors to evaluate their own products to decide whether they can claim OpenAjax Conformance and it is up to the community to point out errors with any vendor claims.
OpenAjax Alliance maintains an email list, conformance@openajax.org, for public discussion around issues around OpenAjax Conformance. If someone from the community disputes one of the vendor's conformance claims, it is recommended that the vendor be notified in an appropriate informative manner that will allow them to correct any erroneous claims. If a vendor makes blatantly false conformance claims, please bring this to the attention of OpenAjax Alliance (e.g., email to conformance@openajax.org) to give the alliance an opportunity to review the situation and determine if there are actions that the alliance might take to address the alleged abuse.
6 OpenAjax 1.0 Conformance
At this time, OpenAjax Alliance has only defined one version of the term OpenAjax Conformance - OpenAjax 1.0 Conformance. Because OpenAjax Alliance has only approved one Specification at this time, the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 Specification, the definition of OpenAjax 1.0 Conformance is simple and only applies to Ajax toolkits.
For an Ajax toolkit to claim OpenAjax 1.0 Conformance:
- The toolkit must support all of the relevant conformance requirements found within the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 Specification.
7 Outlook for the future
It is expected that future versions of OpenAjax Conformances will cover a broader range of technical areas and include various new conformance requirements:
- OpenAjax Registry - Upon approval of the first release of the first OpenAjax Registry Specification, it is expected that an updated definition of OpenAjax Conformance at a higher version level will include additional conformance requirements on Ajax toolkits from the OpenAjax Registry Specification.
- OpenAjax Hub 1.1 - Upon completion and approval of the OpenAjax Hub 1.1 Specification, it is expected that an updated definition of OpenAjax Conformance at a higher version level will include additional conformance requirements on Ajax toolkits from the OpenAjax Hub 1.1 Specification. The Hub 1.1 specification might also include conformance requirements on mashup hosting applications.
- Ajax IDE Metadata - Upon completion and approval of the first Ajax IDE Metadata Specification, it is expected that an updated definition of OpenAjax Conformance at a higher version level will include conformance requirements on Ajax toolkits around metadata.
OpenAjax Alliance has various active committees that are not (at this time this is written) formally chartered, but which might turn into formally chartered activities that produce OpenAjax Alliance Specifications, and therefore might also define conformance requirements. For example, there are possibilities of future formally chartered activities such as Ajax security, mobile Ajax, mashup widgets/gadgets, and accessibility.
OpenAjax Alliance might also produce various Best Practices Specifications that might also include various conformance requirements.
8 Conformance logos
The alliance provides "OpenAjax n.m Conformant" logos on its Web site at location /logos. Organizations that are members of OpenAjax Alliance may use the logos in promotional activities around any of their products that are OpenAjax Conformant at the given n.m level.
9 Open issues
- Where are conformance claims posted? - Is there an email list onto which members post their claims? Is there a wiki page for posting claims? Or are claims simply mentioned within product literature? Is it a requirement to notify OpenAjax Alliance before making a conformance claim?
- Can non-members claim OpenAjax Conformance? - Obvious tradeoffs here. We want to encourage companies to join OpenAjax (which would lead to a "no" answer), but the mission of the alliance is to promote industry interoperability and to evangelize adoption of our interoperability standards (which would lead to a "yes" answer because of not wanting to place barriers to non-members leveraging our standards).
- Details about conformance@openajx.org - We talked about having a public email list named conformance@openajax.org which is a place where the public can publicize incorrect conformance claims. This begs various details:
- What sorts of CYA strategies should we take on the list? Mailman allows for a short description and long description and standard headers and footers with each published email.
- Because of spam, we need to moderate postings to this list. Does this put a business or legal responsibility on the moderator in case competitive issues are raised on the list?
- How should OpenAjax Alliance as an organization respond to such emails? One proposal is that this is a purely public list and OpenAjax only does its best to moderate this list following typical industry practices.
- What about excessive abuses, such as statements made by people in the industry that might damage the reputation of OpenAjax Alliance or hard the OpenAjax Conformance trust brand? Seems like the Steering Committee needs to address those cases. Perhaps we treat these as one-off cases without a formal policy, where if/when something like this arises, the SC chooses an appropriate response.
