My Mash Note to Microsoft, Newest Member of the OpenAjax Alliance

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, March 29, 2007 @ 6:00 am

It is easy to be cynical about Microsoft's recent entry into the OpenAjax Alliance. After all, the alliance is mostly a marketing vehicle for it's members. The "technology" portion of the OpenAjax Alliance revolves mostly around things like playing namespace cop -- more problems of the Javascript language and browser platform than real framework issues -- and is making very modest progress. Beyond the bitching of the odd developer about Prototype not playing nice with other frameworks, the real problem with Ajax frameworks is that they each reinvent the wheel, not that they don't work well together. This sort of ad-hoc interoperability -- making sure that different libraries and frameworks don't clobber one another -- reminds one of the legislative process: when the parties are divided, a weak compromise is often the best for which you can hope. (See John Reisig's take on why the OpenAjax Hub is in fact not a very good technical solution.)

Not that these efforts are useless; they are better than nothing. But both Ajax and the browser platform are still moving targets. Investing heavily in a standard that may evaporate once the next version of the browser comes out or if Ajax development moves away from direct browser programming to more abstracted models (Echo2, GWT, etc.), seems like something you would want to do quite slowly.

So, is Microsoft's entry a sign that it really wants to play nice, or is this part of its diabolical plan to "embrace, extend and extinguish?" I think the answer is more the former than the latter, and that has me feeling all warm and fuzzy towards my blue badge buddies in Redmond. I think Microsoft, by getting rid of its annoying compatibility layer, is trying to embrace open source Ajax libraries. Why? Because they realize that writing fancy eye-candy DHTML/Ajax wizardry is hard and expensive. Much better to treat this little browser ecosystem the way they treat custom WinForm controls -- a marketplace too fragmented for MS to efficiently play, but whose vitality and diversity needs to be encouraged in order to add value to the base platform, .NET in both cases.

I think this apparent willingness to foster third-party Ajax libraries is the real news, not their entry into a very corporate ("Member of the OpenAjax Alliance"), very marketing oriented, marginally technically useful organization.

 
  Technorati : .NET, ajax, editorial, microsoft, openajax alliance, openajax hub

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