In a keynote speech to leading technology executives, David Boloker, IBM's chief technology officer for emerging Internet technologies, said that the combination of Web 2.0 tools and open source communities are creating a "perfect storm" to enable new kinds of collaborations among businesses and their constituents.

Mr. Boloker also announced that IBM would make new technology contributions to the open source community to speed the adoption and growth of Web 2.0 technologies among enterprises.

Included in IBM's newest contributions to the open source community are additional enhancements to the Eclipse Foundation's Ajax Technology Framework (ATF) and the Mozilla Foundation. IBM plans to generate Ajax as part of the JSF Tools in the next release of IBM Rational Application Developer, which is slated to be available later this year.

These kinds of enhancements to Ajax tools help to make it unnecessary to manually refresh a browser to send or receive information over the Web, thereby reducing the steps needed to complete a transaction online. For non technical users, the enhancements allow users to create a new application in minutes by simply "dragging and dropping" items into a Web browser.

"IBM believes the open technologies that make up Web 2.0 are essential drivers to help transform innovation and competitive advantage for our clients," Boloker said. "Many of these Web 2.0 tools are key ingredients for enabling greater communication between disparate groups, as well as improved efficiency and usability. Added to an IT infrastructure based on a services-oriented architecture, savvy enterprises are leveraging open standards to facilitate Web 2.0 functionality for both the advancement of the industry and for individual businesses."

The new technology contributions to the Eclipse ATF project allows clients to run, deploy, debug and configure Ajax technology on any Web server, including WebSphere, Tomcat, Apache, jBoss and WebLogic. Ease of use and simplified creation assets have been updated to allow developers to add Ajax support to existing projects so applications do not have to reside in Eclipse. Important new features introduced for developers are the ability to type in a Web address within the Eclipse ATF and begin debugging Ajax applications and the ability to change CSS and DOM properties with live rendering in the browser.

The Mozilla foundation has updated its toolkits with contributions from IBM that allowed ATF to debug Ajax applications running with ATF that utilize the foundation's XulRunner Rhino code. These enhancements are available in mozilla.org. Ultimately this creates a more efficient Firefox browser for Ajax development and an easier interface for users to shop, work, plan, correspond and navigate online.

IBM also announced the opening of a Web development zone on developerWorks, the skills-building hub of IBM's developer community with nearly 5.5 million registered users. The Web development zone features technical resources for Ajax, PHP, ATOM, RSS, and Ruby, as well as Web development frameworks such as Spring, Shale, Struts, Rails, and Tapestry, all aimed at providing developers with a one-stop shop of resources for creating dynamic Web applications. A core area in this zone is the Ajax resource center, which provides a consolidated section for developers to access Ajax articles, tutorials, technical tips, discussion forums and Web feeds, enabling them to quickly and efficiently find the information they need to build their skills and create interactive Web applications using Ajax techniques. For more information, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ajax.