The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

Over the next few months, almost everything about the company-currently-know-as-ActiveGrid will undergo dramatic transformation. We are announcing the first step in this transformation on Monday with our acquisition of a top Dojo tool provider, TurboAjax.

TurboAjax brings an incredibly cool Dojo widget builder and equally talented developers into ActiveGrid. We first saw their products on July 26 and had a signed Letter of Intent exactly one week later - probably a land speed record for software acquisitions!

This acquisition also lands us at the center of the Dojo community of AJAX developers. Why Dojo? Well, we are targeting the enterprise, where internationalization and security are critical. We believe Dojo is creating the best UI toolkit for enterprise developers.

Earlier this week I waxed eloquent on the flaws in proprietary non-AJAX solutions like Silverlight, Flex and JavaFX. However it is also fair to point out that there are many challenges within the open source AJAX community as well, including:

• Lack of commercial support: without the availability of commercial support, AJAX will not achieve enterprise adoption. With this acquisition, ActiveGrid will now stand behind both the TurboAjax products and the Dojo Toolkit.


• Missing features: common complaints around the Dojo toolkit include lack of complete documentation and robust samples. If AJAX toolkits are to be adopted, they need the same polish as proprietary solutions like Flex.


• Inconsistent standards: as the saying goes, the nice thing about AJAX standards is that there are so many to choose from. There is an alphabet soup of Javascript libraries out there, including JQuery, Prototype, Rico, Scriptaculous, Ext and YUI. Each of these takes a very different approach to solving the same problem.


• Security: don't even get me started on the security challenges in an environment full of widgets, gadgets and 3rd party web services. Suffice it to say that when this rock gets turned over, lots of ugly stuff creepy-crawly things will slither out.

The AJAX world needs a RedHat to create a common distribution and provide commercial support and training behind an enterprise-ready toolkit. With our TurboAjax acquisition, ActiveGrid is taking an important first step down this path. Stay tuned for our next move!

Labels: AJAX, DOJO, Ext, JQuery, Prototype, YUI