With the continued evolution of AJAX enabled technologies which dramatically simplify how to build AJAX applications, will the term "AJAX" simply wither away as ALL Web technologies will eventually support AJAX and the novelty of rich client Web development will disappear? That is the question to be discussed at AJAXWorld 2007 East by Chris Schalk (pictured), Principal Product Manager and Java Evangelist for Oracle's application server and development tools division.

Schalk's primary expertise is Web application development and he works to define the overall set of Web development features for Oracle JDeveloper including JavaServer Faces and ADF Faces. He also serves as Oracle's representative to the OpenAJAX Alliance, which will be in March 2007 continuing its tradition of organizing its biggest meetings to coincide with AJAXWorld, since so many of its 50 members companies will be represented at AJAXWorld as either sponsors, exhibitors, and/or speakers.

The OpenAjax Alliance fills the AJAX interoperability gap in the industry. Other standards organizations such as W3C develop standards focused on what building-block features browsers must support, such as HTML, CSS, DOM, SVG, and JavaScript/ECMAScript. The OpenAjax Alliance addresses a technology layer above these browser formats, where the alliance defines "OpenAjax" specifications and best practices such that multiple AJAX toolkits will coexist and interoperate with the same AJAX-powered application.

Membership
To date, more than 50 organizations have joined the OpenAjax Alliance, including:

Adobe Ajaxian American Greetings (AG/Interactive) Backbase BEA Bling Software Borland Curl Dojo Foundation Eclipse Foundation edge IPK eLink Business Innovations ENOVIA MatrixOne Fair Isaac Finetooth The Front Side Google IBM ICEsoft Ikivo ILOG IN2 Innoopract Intel IT MILL JackBe

Javeline JWAX Laszlo Systems Merced Systems Mozilla Corporation Nexaweb Nitobi Novell OpenLink Software Openwave Systems Opera Oracle Red Hat SAP Scalix Seagull Software Sitepen Software AG Sun Microsystems Tibco Vertex Logic Vircom Webtide XML11 Zend Zimbra Zoho