OpenAjax Hub

Here is a quote from Coach's blog, related to the main challanges that OpenAjax is trying to address to get interoperability:



coachwei.com :: OpenAjax Update - Addressing Key Challenges for Ajax Adoption :

• # Toolkit “loading and unloading”(the capability to load and unload more than one Ajax toolkits into one page): For example, right now a lot of toolkits overload the “onload” function, which will certainly cause collision with another toolkit;
  
  
• # Name collision (the capability to deal with variable and function name collision). For example, quite a few Ajax toolkits today use “$” as a function name. When they are all loaded onto the same page, what happens?
  
  
• # Event Hub (The capability to have interaction between different Ajax toolkits). The key requirement here is to enable some kind of “event” propagation so that an event generated from toolkit A can be processed by toolkit B. An example is that the user drags an item from Toolkit A and drops it on Toolkit B – how should this two toolkits communicate the information related to this event? The proper solution is to provide a common event hub that each Ajax toolkit can publish and subscribe events. Initially, we do not have to define the details of different event objects, which can be defined in the future.
  
  
• # Markup scanning (the capability for an Ajax toolkit to scan an HTML document to pick up the interested markup segments for processing): many Ajax toolkits allow the usage of markup to define components within an HTML page but they all have their own mechanism of scanning the document. If more than one toolkit is loaded, the HTML document maybe scanned multiple times with the danger of causing significant inefficiency and collision. Providing a common mechanism to scan an HTML document would solve this problem.
  
  
• # Network Hub (server connectivity management): most browsers allow only limited number of connections to the server (for example, Internet Explorer allows only two). If each Ajax toolkit uses its own mechanism to handle server connectivity, it is highly likely collision will happen if more than one Ajax toolkits are loaded on the same page. A proper solution is to provide a common mechanism that centrally manages server connectivity and serves all registered toolkits.;

Apart from this list, they point out other missing factors, but that shall not be addressed by OpenAJAX. They are performance issues, the multiple toolkit bloating problem, whether there are security issues with AJAX, and if so, how do they die. Other interesting problems arise with mobility and offline execution of AJAX-based code, as well as with application development and maintenance.



These last two are particularly interesting to my work. The mentioned post talks about a blog with mobility issues: SitePen Blog » mobile.