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The OpenAjax Alliance is an industry group devoted to the set of technologies and Web programming techniques known as Ajax.

OpenAjax Alliance membership consists of vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax who work with Ajax-based Web technologies. The organization was formed by Ajax companies and open source projects to address issues that require coordination among the many organizations that create and/or use Ajax products and technologies. The alliance does not collect dues nor maintain a staff, and thus all of its activities are the result of voluntary contributions from its 100+ member organizations.

The organization's target customer is the Web developer or IT professional who wants to use Ajax technologies to deliver Web applications with rich user interfaces. The alliance's technical focus is interoperability across different Ajax products and technologies. Interoperability enables customers to integrate multiple Ajax technologies from different Ajax technology providers. This interoperability mission fits within the Alliance's philosophy, whereby the Alliance embraces diversity, innovation, and competition within an open marketplace, rather than relying on a single one-size-fits-all technology approach.

Additionally, OpenAjax Alliance engages in educational and communications activities, such as Web pages and white papers posted on its Web site, a wiki, email lists, and press releases.

History

In late 2005, with leadership from IBM, a small number of companies brainstormed about how to ensure that Ajax fulfills its potential as the industry standard rich application platform based on open technologies. These early discussions came to a climax on Feb. 1, 2006, with the announcement of the "OpenAjax Initiative", whose 15 original companies included BEA, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Google, IBM, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra. 1

Between February 1 and May 15, 2006, an additional 15 organizations joined "OpenAjax", and the (then) 30 companies held a two-day kickoff meeting in San Francisco to lay out the blue-print for the initiative moving forward. At the meeting, the group decided to establish the OpenAjax Alliance, defined its mission, agreed on an interim organizational process, and established its initial activities 2.

Subsequently, the participating companies defined a formal governance model via a Members Agreement, and then began execution on its various marketing/educational and technical activities. The initial Web site and white paper went live in September 2006 3. The alliance elected its first Steering Committee in October 2006 4. The first technical product from the alliance was the OpenAjax Hub, with a complete draft specification and reference open source implementation completed by December 2006 and integrated a dozen Ajax toolkits on a trial basis as part of the alliance's first OpenAjax InteropFest 5.