| By Coach Wei, on behalf of the OpenAjax Alliance |
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| July 17, 2008 05:45 AM EDT |
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What does the Ajax community want from
future browsers? How are these different requests prioritized? Web developers
have done amazing things with Ajax
for both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications, but what barriers need to be removed
to enable the next generation of browser-based innovations? The future of Ajax runtime environments
matters more than ever today. In late 2007,
OpenAjax Alliance formed the Runtime Task Force (
http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/Runtime)
to address this community concern. The goal is to collect, articulate, and
prioritize key issues from the Ajax
community, and communicate them to browser vendors. This will help educate the
community in large, help browser vendors better plan for their product roadmap,
and help developers better use Ajax.
Article author Coach Wei speaking at a previous AJAXWorld RIA Conference
There are other
great rich Web UI technology initiatives such as W3C’s HTML5, CSS3 and SVG. The
OpenAjax browser wish list is not intended to compete with these initiatives,
but instead complements them by capturing and communicating the views of the
web development community (the folks who are “users” of Ajax techniques).
1. The Process
In Phase I,
OpenAjax Alliance collected an initial list of feature requests. This is
largely done by researching blogs, meetings with OpenAjax members and Ajax experts, and interviewing leading Ajax toolkits.
The initial
wish list was announced in April 2008 for community review and feedback. A group of industry experts were being
actively approached for feedback (see
Phase I Voting wiki page).
Phase II
started in May. The Alliance
re-organized the feature lists based on Phase I results. Phase II wish list was put into voting in
June. Voting was open to the general community. For each feature request, a
voter can vote from 0 to 10 to indicate how strongly the voter feels the need
for this request (10 being the most important).
The voting
ended on July 13th 2008.
2. Feature List Summary
A total of
55 features were written up by various people in community. These writeups
typically cover areas such as what the feature is, background, why the feature
is important, possible solutions/recommended approaches for this feature,
references, etc.
As a result
of community feedback, some features are classified into “InActive”. For Phase
II voting, there is a list of 37 active features. The current feature request
list is:
Security features
Client-server
communications features
HTML5/W3C features
CSS features
Rendering/interaction/event
handling features
Performance
features
JavaScript features
Other features
3. Community Voting
Results
By July 13,
when the voting closed, this initiative has turned out to be a bigger success than
expected. Given the amount of effort
required to read and understand the vast web technology landscape, and the
relatively limited time and resources available to the OpenAjax Alliance
Runtime participants, we were hoping for
50 or so people to vote, which would be meaningful to establish a rough idea
of what's most important to the community.
Voting
results are available at:
Here are
some quick statistics:
See next page for the Top Requested Features
Coach Wei is the Founder and Chairman of Nexaweb (www.nexaweb.com), developers of the leading software platform for building and deploying Web 2.0 and AJAX applications. Previously, he played a key role at EMC Corporation in the development of a new generation of storage network management software. Wei has his master's degree from MIT, holds several patents, is the author of several technology publications including JDJ, Web 2.0 Journal, and AJAXWorld Magazine, and is an industry advocate for the proliferation of open standards.
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