John Ferraiolo will be leading the OpenAjax Alliance initiative on a day-to-day basis henceforth, an announcement that was made at the recent Real-World Ajax Seminar in New York. John recently joined OpenAjax initiator IBM, coming over from Adobe (which is also a member of the Alliance). He will be based in the Silicon Valley area.

IBM's David Boloker had been leading the charge for IBM, but told conference attendees that he was "booked at about 200% to 300% of my schedule" during the initial months of the OpenAjax organization. Boloker said he started working on OpenAjax in October 2005, and was making very frequent trips from his Boston location to the West Coast to meet with prospective members.

The OpenAjax  liance now has 34 members, Boloker said, with the majority of them based in the Silicon Valley area. Members met in May in San Francisco to discuss overarching issues related to promoting Ajax in as coherent a manner as possible, to eliminate sources of confusion for developers and allow Ajax to continue to grow in popularity. Interoperability has emerged as a top-level issue, and members plan to discuss this and other big issues that emerge in another group face-to-face meeting later this year.

The OpenAjax Alliance is not trying to become a standards body, nor will it produce specific products. It does not have a formal board or membership levels at this point. Boloker and Ferraiolo confirmed at the Real-World Ajax Seminar that the alliance continues to seek members, and that they are in discussions with a number of companies, including Sun and Microsoft, about their potential inclusion in this group. Although there is not a formal infrastructure to the group, it has created a website at www.openajaxalliance.org; the site does not yet contain information other than John Ferraiolo's e-mail address, but he said that he does expect the website to be built out in the coming weeks and months.