AJAX & RIA Journal Special: Results of OpenAjax Alliance's Browser Feature Wish List

AJAX community ranks vector graphics as top request

By: Coach Wei; on behalf of the OpenAjax Alliance

Jul. 17, 2008 05:45 AM

What does the Ajax community want from future browsers? How are these different requests prioritized? Web developers have done amazing things with Ajax for both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications, but what barriers need to be removed to enable the next generation of browser-based innovations? The future of Ajax runtime environments matters more than ever today.

In late 2007, OpenAjax Alliance formed the Runtime Task Force (http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/Runtime) to address this community concern. The goal is to collect, articulate, and prioritize key issues from the Ajax community, and communicate them to browser vendors. This will help educate the community in large, help browser vendors better plan for their product roadmap, and help developers better use Ajax.

Article author Coach Wei speaking at a previous AJAXWorld RIA Conference

There are other great rich Web UI technology initiatives such as W3C’s HTML5, CSS3 and SVG. The OpenAjax browser wish list is not intended to compete with these initiatives, but instead complements them by capturing and communicating the views of the web development community (the folks who are “users” of Ajax techniques).

1. The Process

The OpenAjax Runtime initiative used a two phased process. A special wiki site http://www.openajax.org/runtime/wiki/Main_Page was set up to facilitate communication and collaboration.

In Phase I, OpenAjax Alliance collected an initial list of feature requests. This is largely done by researching blogs, meetings with OpenAjax members and Ajax experts, and interviewing leading Ajax toolkits.

The initial wish list was announced in April 2008 for community review and feedback. A group of industry experts were being actively approached for feedback (see Phase I Voting wiki page).

Phase II started in May. The Alliance re-organized the feature lists based on Phase I results. Phase II wish list was put into voting in June. Voting was open to the general community. For each feature request, a voter can vote from 0 to 10 to indicate how strongly the voter feels the need for this request (10 being the most important).

The voting ended on July 13^th 2008.

2. Feature List Summary

A total of 55 features were written up by various people in community. These writeups typically cover areas such as what the feature is, background, why the feature is important, possible solutions/recommended approaches for this feature, references, etc.

As a result of community feedback, some features are classified into “InActive”. For Phase II voting, there is a list of 37 active features. The current feature request list is:

Security features

Client-server communications features

HTML5/W3C features

CSS features

Rendering/interaction/event handling features

Performance features

JavaScript features

Other features

3. Community Voting Results

By July 13, when the voting closed, this initiative has turned out to be a bigger success than expected. Given the amount of effort required to read and understand the vast web technology landscape, and the relatively limited time and resources available to the OpenAjax Alliance Runtime participants, we were hoping for 50 or so people to vote, which would be meaningful to establish a rough idea of what's most important to the community.

Voting results are available at:

Here are some quick statistics:

222 participants;
143 people voted;
55 feature request being written up;
Various Industry leaders contributed;
A discussion thread spawns on Slashdot with 628 comments (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/30/1845201).

See next page for the Top Requested Features

Published Jul. 17, 2008— Reads 2,152 — Feedback 1
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media. All Rights Reserved.

▪ White Paper: "OpenAjax Alliance on Mobile AJAX and Recent Browser Advances"

▪ OpenAjax Alliance: Browser Engine Access To Mobile Device APIs

About Coach Wei
Coach Wei is the Founder and Chairman of Nexaweb (www.nexaweb.com), developers of the leading software platform for building and deploying Web 2.0 and AJAX applications. Previously, he played a key role at EMC Corporation in the development of a new generation of storage network management software. Wei has his master's degree from MIT, holds several patents, is the author of several technology publications including JDJ, Web 2.0 Journal, and AJAXWorld Magazine, and is an industry advocate for the proliferation of open standards.

About on behalf of the OpenAjax Alliance

CFDJ LATEST STORIES . . .

Adobe Comes Up Short, Cans 600

By Maureen O'Gara

As fate would have it, Adobe picked the worst possible quarter to roll out the great update to its flagship Creative Suite widgetry. Because the economy is tanking, it hasn’t been selling the way it was supposed to. As a result, revenues came up short in the November quarter and Adob...

An Introduction to Ant

By John Ashenfelter

Writing shell scripts to automate the build and deploy process for ColdFusion applications is not very much fun. The Jakarta Ant project is an open-source, cross-platform alternative that makes it easy to automate the build and deploy process.

ARM to Get Flash

By Maureen O'Gara

Adobe and ARM are gonna put Flash Player 10 and AIR, the stuff of web video and rich Internet apps, on ARM widgets by the second half of next year. They mean phones, set-tops, MIDs, TVs, car mojo and personal media devices, which have so far only had access to Flash Lite, not the best ...

It's Saturday Evening, and I'm in San Francisco

By Yakov Fain

Of all domestic air carriers, I like Continental the most. They showed Mamma Mia and the food was bearable. Last month, I was in the air for 14 hours flying to Japan, and now the trip across the USA is a piece of cake. I have only carry luggage with me. This small bag has all the cloth...

MAX is One of the Best Places to Improve Your Technical Flex Skills

By Yakov Fain

I’ll just give you one example. Last week my colleague and I were running a private Flex workshop for software architects of a large corporation who are about to start development with Flex. Needless to say that they are smart and experienced software professionals. Some of them alre...

The Cloud Comes This Week to San Jose

By Cloud Computing News Desk

A round-up of the many themes and topics of interest to infrastructure architects, developers and IT managers featuring at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo being held November 19-21, 2008 at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California. The conference is expecting a record turnout of senio...