ICEsoft Technologies, a provider of enterprise AJAX solutions, has announced the release of WebMC, an AJAX-based web conferencing solution, as an open source community project. WebMC is an ICEfaces application that allows users to do simple, streamlined web conferencing on the Internet using AJAX technology. The solution is currently hosted as an on-demand service at http://webmc.icefaces.org and is accessible free of charge. Users are invited to use WebMC for online collaboration at their convenience. It is also available as a full source code download to developers interested in customizing and hosting the application.

"Since open sourcing ICEfaces earlier this month, we have seen an explosion of interest in the ICEfaces technology," said Steve Maryka, CTO of ICEsoft. "ICEfaces has now been downloaded well over 40,000 times in a little over three weeks and momentum continues to build. We are committed to the thriving ICEfaces community and the release of WebMC is proof of that."

WebMC started as a demo application to showcase ICEfaces and specifically AJAX Push capabilities. ICEsoft pioneered AJAX Push with its ICEfaces solution, which allows presentation changes to be asynchronously pushed from the application server to the browser client. The company's AJAX Push technology enables a new breed of rich enterprise applications, such as WebMC, that provide instant feedback to participants when client-side or server-side application events occur. With WebMC, participants can easily host web conferences, collaborate, chat, and share PowerPoint slides across all commercial web browsers. WebMC is an AJAX-based rich internet application so no browser plug-ins are required.

"By turning WebMC over to the community, we hope that the application will evolve rapidly," adds Ted Goddard, Senior Architect for ICEfaces. "The initial release of Web MC is just a starting point in terms of features and functionality. As the community embraces it, I expect that developers will quickly integrate WebMC with Internet audio conferencing, multimedia formats, and shared whiteboard capability."

ICEfaces is professional-grade open source software specifically engineered to meet the unique challenges of enterprise application development and deployment. The solution extends JavaServerFaces, enabling Java software developers to more easily create and deploy thin-client rich Web applications in Java Technology. It leverages the entire standards-based Java EE ecosystem of tools and execution environments and resolves mission critical deployment issues such as scalability, availability, and redundancy. At the same time, ICEfaces delivers the most secured AJAX application model in the industry. Its applications are Java technology based applications, not JavaScript applications.

ICEfaces and WebMC are licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) v1.1. ICEfaces and WebMC are available immediately for download. To download, go to http://www.icefaces.org/ .