Sun Microsystems remains among the prominent companies missing from the OpenAjax collaborative that is being driven by IBM. Dan Roberts (pictured left), Director of Developer Tools Marketing at Sun Microsystems, had previously told SYS-CON that the company is open to talking to IBM about the Open AJAX initiative. "We're not sure exactly what the initiative means, what its goals are, and so we are open to a dialog (with IBM) about (Open AJAx)," he said in an exclusive interview with SYS-CON.

But Roberts had "nothing new to comment" about the latest OpenAjax developments, according to a spokesperson for Sun. Big Blue recently announced 13 new members of the OpenAjax initative, as well as plans for members to meet and discuss several overarching issues. (See http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/219125.htm)

Founding members of OpenAjax had previously told SYS-CON that IBM's David Boloker (pictured left) was a driving influence in outlining the OpenAjax strategy. SYS-CON had also previously interviewed Boloker about the OpenAjax collaboration, shortly after it was announced in February 2006. (Incidentally, Boloker will be among the presenters at the Real-World AJAX Seminar in New York June 5-6.)

Meanwhile, Sun has very recently embarked on an aggressive AJAX strategy of its own, with two new web portals and Project jMaki, which the company describes as "an open source JavaScript Wrapper Framework for the Java Platform. Project jMaki is a wrapper framework that allows developers to take JavaScript widgets from many popular AJAX frameworks, and wrap them into a JSP or JSF tag. This provides a Java Language view of JavaScript components."

"AJAX is increasingly becoming a core part of how next generation Web applications are built today, and we at Sun want to do everything we can to help developers learn about, and be productive using, this new pattern for development," Roberts said in conjunction with this announcement. "Providing developers with a single source for everything from code samples and blueprints to tools and runtime support will greatly accelerate the learning curve and provide developers access to technology from Sun faster."

Roberts outlined Sun's recent Java Studio Creator 2 product and strategy during the previous interview cited above, and noted that Sun has been working with AJAX developers for some time. He said that Sun's current non-involvement with Open AJAX does not preclude cooperation between the company and other members of the initiative. He noted, in fact, that Sun is working with IBM on a specific aspect of AJAX tools development.