At Last Microsoft Joins the OpenAjax Alliance

Since joining the Alliance since March, the OpenAjax Alliance has been courting Microsoft’s Atlas to join in the bandwagon to standardize Ajax. Since there’s no standardization from 3WC, the big leaders in businesses decided to come together and create the standards for Ajax.

From the time it started, it has already attracted great business leaders such as IBM, Oracle and other web developing companies. The Alliance started in 2005 with IBM as the pace setter. It only had 15 members but as the trend of Ajax has crawled into almost all facets of internet technology, the number of members has also joined in. But with all the brouhaha and fame of the Alliance, industry giant Microsoft’s Atlas decided to shy away from the alliance. One of the known reasons was that their Ajax web toolkit, Atlas may have failed the series of tests for compatibility set by the OpenAjax Alliance. It may have been a business move for Microsoft to create an independent Ajax program to alienate other products. As the industry giant, they can bully their way up to the top by posting their own version of the Ajax webtool kit. It seemed that Microsoft missed out on one thing; they are not dealing with customers but with the smartest of web developers. These web developers know a program inside and out and if they are given enough time, they can create their own toolkit. That’s why industry leaders will have their own set of followers as every single toolkit and technology will specialize in something. Instead of being the leader of technology, they have just become one of the players that could or could not be the preferred tool of web developers. And because they haven’t joined the alliance and passed the Interop test for Ajax compatibility with other programs, instead of moving forward the developers of the technology are experiencing alienation of their own since it can’t be compatible to other systems. After almost a year of wooing Microsoft to be part of the alliance, the software giant now joins more than the present 80 members. Their Ajax toolkit, Atlas has been under the interop tests and is now compatible with other toolkits and framworks. The official date of being part of the OpenAjax alliance was September 20 and this development will be presented to the Ajax World Conference in Santa Clara, Ca. Microsoft’s Atlas passed together with the Dojo Foundation, Apache Software Foundation and Nexaweb. With the addition of Microsoft’s Atlas, there will be more options for the programmers and web developers as one of the giants of the industry has finally created a conforming tool. This will certainly for the good of the alliance as they move forward together not only for profit but for the ease of development. Because of the development, programmers will not have easier access to better programming tools with out the encountering the problem of creating too much codes. And customers will now have better technology in their hands to use because of the development.