Open Ajax Alliance
Zimbra is a cofounder as well as a key technology contributor to the Open Ajax Alliance. Since 2005, Zimbra has been working collaboratively with partners IBM, the Eclipse Foundation, Mozilla Corporation, the Apache Foundation, the Dojo Foundation, Red Hat, Yahoo!, Google, and several other companies and organizations on this initiative.
The goal of Open Ajax is to make the delivery of rich Ajax user interfaces substantially easier than it has been for solutions like Zimbra that pioneered the Ajax model (the Zimbra Ajax UI was launched in late 2003). At the same time, the Open Ajax Alliance seeks to ensure that there is a compelling Ajax platform that remains independent of
- Client browser, operating system, and device/hardware
- Server container/language (Java, PHP, Ruby, C#, etc.), operating system, and hardware
Participants in the Open Ajax Alliance see collaboration through existing open source communities as our best means to preserve the multi-client, multi-server value proposition of the World-wide Web as we deliver richer user interfaces via Ajax and other Web 2.0 technologies.
Zimbra has provided the Kabuki Ajax Toolkit (AjaxTK) to the Open Ajax Alliance. Kabuki is an object-oriented JavaScript runtime library with a standard set of widgets, an event framework, and communication tools. Kabuki is available today under both the Mozilla and Apache Public Licenses. You are welcome to download Kabuki independently from the Zimbra Collaboration Suite as well as review the Kabuki AjaxTK whitepaper. Going forward, open source developers seeking to contribute to this technology can join the Zimbra Community.
At the same time, Open Ajax will support other Ajax runtimes, such as the Dojo Toolkit, in addition to Kabuki. The goal is to get a handful of open source Ajax toolkit runtimes to critical mass and ensure they are each well integrated with Eclipse and Mozilla technologies (Think SWT and Swing from the Java days).
Zimbra's core mission is to dramatically improve the messaging and collaboration experience for both users and administrators. Why, then, choose to share the Kabuki AjaxTK technology independently from the Zimbra Collaboration Suite?
- Zimbra users, administrators, and developers that leverage the Zimbra Web 2.0 user interface all fundamentally depend on Ajax. It behooves Zimbra to help ensure critical mass for an Ajax platform that is both open source and works across client and server technologies.
- We can bring additional open source investment in innovation, extension, and hardening to the Kabuki AjaxTK that will be greater than what the Zimbra community can provide on its own.
- While most Zimlets (Zimbra's model for integrating with or "mashing up" existing applications and systems) are declaratively specified in XML, we wanted to make it easier for developers to enrich Zimlets with custom Ajax code leveraging the capabilities of Eclipse and Mozilla authoring and debugging technologies.
- Last but not least, the greater open source community has been hugely beneficial to Zimbra. This was yet another way for Zimbra to give something back to that community.
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