How relevant is the OpenAjax Alliance to the average web developer?

Question

The OpenAjax Alliance states that it is an "organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax," but I don't find any questions on stackoverflow that reference them. I am wondering if it is important to the practicing web developer. John Resig has a Thoughts on OpenAjax blog post in Feb 2007, but I can't find many other references.

I have looked at the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 as a way to do publish/subscribe messaging in the browser (similar to TIBCO PageBus, which implements the specification). Is anyone using this technology effectively in a large, public facing web application?

Answer 1

We're (www.frozenmountain.com) actually a member of the OpenAjax alliance, due to our work on our comet server for IIS, WebSync, which is based on the bayeux protocol. To be honest, haven't found it hugely useful so far. A lot of the groups did some work and then disbanded. I really haven't heard much from anyone since we joined.

Answer 2

TIBCO has found PageBus (implementing the OpenAjax Hub) to be very useful in our own products. We have also noticed that a variety of open-source toolkits and third party products have embedded TIBCO PageBus as well, and some very large enterprises are using this techology.

OpenAjax Hub 2.0 (implemented by TIBCO PageBus 2.0) is very important. It adds the ability to sandbox components such as gadgets, which is incredibly valuable when you need your mash-ups to be secure. Definitely worth understanding!

-Howard Weingram