Wednesday, 26 September 2007

OpenAjax Alliance Recognises Mashups

OpenAjax Alliance has revealed new initiatives for secure mashups and mobile Ajax, as well as a new white paper on Ajax security.

Ajax is the technology behind the increasingly popular "mashup," a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. As Ajax and mashups continue to gain widespread acceptance under the Web 2.0 umbrella, it is critical for organisations to understand these threats and to avoid them by adhering to some best practices.

The alliance has released a new white paper titled "Ajax and Mashup Security," which summarises the ways in which Ajax applications could be attacked and provides a set of best practice techniques to address each of the vulnerability areas.

"Getahead is delighted to see the progress the OpenAjax Alliance is making particularly with regard to security and secure mashups," said Joe Walker, creator of Direct Web Remoting and president of Getahead. "The DWR project has long been a strong advocate of better Ajax security, so this advance is great news."

"ICEsoft has long recognized that security for enterprise class applications is a critical requirement," said Robert Lepack, VP of Marketing for ICEsoft Technologies. "We view the publication of the Open Ajax White paper 'Ajax and Mashup Security,' to be an important step in the ongoing need to both educate customers on the potential security risks of Ajax applications and the best practices described in the paper to be a key step toward developing much needed standards."

In addition to a strong focus on security, the OpenAjax Alliance is holding InteropFest 1.0, which is the final integration-testing phase of OpenAjax Hub 1.0. OpenAjax Hub is a small JavaScript library that allows multiple Ajax toolkits to work together on the same page. The central feature is a publish/subscribe event manager, which enables loose assembly and integration of Ajax components. OpenAjax Alliance will deliver both an open specification and a reference open source implementation. Standards are the key to interoperability, and allow the true possibilities of Ajax and Web 2.0 to be realised.

"To further advance the Ajax ecosystem, OpenAjax Alliance members together are developing a standard way to describe Ajax controls and their programmatic interfaces so that it becomes easier for developers to use Ajax libraries with development tools," said Kevin Hakman, director, TIBCO Software Inc. and Chair of the Alliance IDE Working Group. "We're on pace to have an Ajax control description specification ready for early 2008."