AJAXWorld A group pushing interoperability between competing AJAX tools and widgets has claimed a wave of certification, although results are far from clear.

The OpenAjax Alliance Monday claimed the "successful interoperability of two key technologies with more than a dozen AJAX products".

The technologies in question are an Alliance Metadata 1.0 specification that theoretically lets competing AJAX tools share similar capabilities, such as drag-and-drop, while also defining what exactly a mashable widget looks like. The Alliance was also touting its Hub 1.1 that isolates widgets used in a mashup for greater security and manages communications. The Hub will be delivered as an open specification and a "commercial-grade" open source reference implementation.

The Alliance Monday named Adobe, Aptana, the Dojo Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Google, IBM, ILOG, Lightstreamer, Nexaweb, ProgrammableWeb, SAP, and TIBCO as all having received interoperability awards.

Who and what is certified, though, is uncertain.

Officially it seems just Adobe and Dojo have delivered something tangible. Adobe said it has used OpenAjax Metadata as Dreamweaver's native format for defining AJAX widgets while Dojo said "many widgets" in the Dijit project support OpenAjax Metadata.

Pressed by AJAXWorld delegates, though, OpenAjax Alliance leader John Ferraiolo said Adobe and Dojo had released "sample widgets," indicating what they'd offered was not as comprehensive as the official release suggested.

Eclipse and IBM committed to "future support" for the metadata specification in their respective JavaScript Development Toolkit (JSDT) and the Rational Application Developer (RAD) tools. Lightstreamer and ILOG - in the process of being purchased by IBM - claimed to have "demonstrated compliance" but didn't go into details.

That left Aptana, Google, Nexaweb, ProgrammableWeb, SAP, and Tibco offering platitudes and slaps on the back about their participation in the process, and the merits of openness, without saying what they'd certified or what their plans were.

It's the latest curious chapter in the life of an organization that saw a rush of organizations sign up, but seems to stimulate little but apathy on an industry level. The group's wishlist of AJAX features for browsers this year only received a surge of interested following our reports of how members were ignoring the project.

Ferraiolo told AJAXWorld Scalable Vector Graphics was the number-one request for browsers on that wishlist, a request he called "a hit" with Alliance member Microsoft.

Looking ahead, Ferraiolo said the Alliance planned more work on communications and security for AJAX-based mashups.

The Alliance will focus next on messaging between widgets and on single sign on for people to log into different AJAX-based services in different domains securely without needing to re-enter different user names and passwords. He did not put a date on either. ®