developerWorks: You're listening to developerWorks interviews where we feature conversations with IT luminaries as well as thought leaders from other disciplines who have interesting things to share about information technology. I'm your host, Scott Laningham, and today our guest is David Boloker, CTO of IBM's emerging Internet technology effort. He joins us from New York City. Hi, David.

Boloker: How are you doing?

developerWorks: Thanks for coming on today.

Boloker: Not a problem.

developerWorks: I wonder if we could kick this off with just a little summary from you about what Ajax is and why it's such a big deal.

Boloker: Well, Ajax is a programming paradigm that's built on top of a lot of the standards that were put in place through the W3C and other places through the late '90s. And these standards included HTML, VHTML, ECMA script, XML, cascading style sheets. And when you looked at using all of these things together what it really gave you is something that became known as Ajax. Now Ajax, the whole promise of Ajax, has more to do with trying to get a lot of the richness in terms of UI visualness, as well as some of the drag-and-drop paradigms all into the browsers. And when I say into the browsers, it's all into Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Konqueror, etc. So when you start thinking about a lot of the effort that's gone on, you look at Ajax and the spread of Ajax toolkits, which are basically JavaScript toolkits from 170-plus open source projects, as well as about 20- to 30-plus vendors.

developerWorks: So if that explanation isn't enough to get a developer excited, then what do you say?

Boloker: So, why you have to get excited about it? Think about in today's world, where everything is either based on the Windows® platform and the APIs that have to do with it, or if they're based in Linux®, so would have to do with the APIs and the platform that come from GNOME or KDE, or if on Mac, they come from Carbon. And each and every one of these is a programming paradigm unto itself, and you can build very, very nice user interfaces. However, if you want a portable interface that looks the same and is actually very vivid, it's almost impossible to get one that looks alike across all the platforms. What Ajax is actually enabling you to do is in a Web browser have that same look and feel and that richness of a lot of that functionality that only used to be able to get in the core operating system. And that's really what, if you want to look at it, the promise of Ajax is. And the state of Ajax in the world, is you know, if you think about this, this all started back in the late '90s. And as you start looking forward what we've got is in the '90s we learned how to do a lot of work in the early 2000 period with leading-edge work that came out of Microsoft® with Outlook® Web Access, Domino Web Access, startups like a company called Oddpost, which became the new mail system that Yahoo! is using. These are all the early Ajax efforts. And as people will now started to use all these, they're starting to see that richness and the vitality and the promise actually pay off. It's also looking at "How do I start joining a lot of disparate systems that today were a one off that had a UI here or a UI there?" They now can have the same UI.

developerWorks: I know you feel like Web 2.0, of course, is the real subject here. Where does Ajax fit into that story and how important is it to Web 2.0?

Boloker: So Ajax is yet a piece of Web 2.0 because Web 2.0 is not only about Ajax it's about simplicity, it's about social software, it's about how do I remix content? And when you start thinking of remixing content, you're also thinking about what has commercially been called mashups. And mashups come in all, you know, states and forms. You can see mashups today, if you go out on the Web, typically people are doing mashups of some data on top of maps. And there are many, many examples of this. Some of the examples are companies like Zillow, basically, will take property values and put them right on top of a location on a map. And that's just one example. There are other examples. There's a piece of technology that we're working on in my group called QED wiki, which allows you to take whether it's a map UI or it takes pure data and you actually can drop locations and mix location data, as well as data coming from other places all through the use of not only Ajax but this whole concept of remixability.

developerWorks: David, what's your sense of the general developer perspective or, say, receptivity regarding Ajax?

Boloker: Well, I think that there's a lot of things that when developers look at Ajax, they see No. 1: an unbelievable simple and rich way of creating an Internet experience that they've been striving for, for years. Because if you think of where the Web started from in the early '90s, it was a publishing paradigm. A pretty, you know, I think advanced publishing paradigm, but it was pretty flat when you looked at what you could do and couldn't do. And as we went from the early Web in through e-business, and as we've grown into Ajax and Web 2.0, we're seeing, No. 1: the amount of richness jumping in. And you know, richness comes in many shapes and forms. Think about what today gets done on sites like MySpace, FaceBook, for that matter, other sites that use collaborative work like Zimbra. These are all highly Ajax. And when I say highly Ajax, the whole programming paradigm behind them that they're creating user interface is Ajax, so you're starting to see a lot of markup going in the back, back and forth to servers, and on the front end, you see that nice vitality, you see the drag-and-drop motions. So there's a lot of the simplicity of interfaces and more importantly than that, we're basically allowing people to reach out to a very different type of customer that it couldn't five years ago or for sure 10 years ago. Now, when you start looking at all this stuff, programmers have a lot to learn. And part of it is, you know, this learning experience you can get off the Web, you can look up articles, for example in Wikipedia. There are a lot of books on Ajax. And we and others formed a group called OpenAjax Alliance.

developerWorks: Yes, that was my next question. I was wondering if you could give us a little something about the intention of that group -- what its purpose is.

Boloker:So OpenAjax Alliance actually was formed, and the story begins in that Scott Deetson from Zimbra and I were sitting together actually and talking about how hard it was to find programmers who knew Ajax and could actually write very, very good Web 2.0-like applications. And then as we started talking through this we said, you know, there are a couple of things that are really needed in the industry, and look across the whole industry as opposed to just one specific vendor. And the first thing that really just popped out was the need for education. For example, what is Ajax? What are some good examples of Ajax usage? What about some not only examples but also if you want to look at pros on how to use it, what are the right ways and the wrong ways of doing it? So that was the first thing we focused on. The second thing we focused on was how Ajax could work across the industry, because one of the key problems you have when you say you've got 100 some odd, actually, 150, 160 plus toolkits in open source, plus you have toolkits coming from commercial vendors, is that whole concept of compatibility at the widget level, in other words, at the JavaScript level, there is none today. So one of the other things that we're trying to do in open Ajax is get all the vendors to speak with one another and come up with a simple way of, I can take their widget and use it in my toolkit because we're going to see a lot of that happen over the next few years in a lot of Web sites. So that's another piece of work that's coming out of OpenAjax. The third piece is not only talking about how one can share those widgets but more importantly allow people to take code directly from SourceForge in our case, which is where we're doing a lot of our work, and bringing it in and start using that sharing code which today we call Ajax Hub. And when you put the whole thing together, it kind of feels a state of the world where we're trying to get a message out, we're trying to work across all the vendors, and a third thing is we're trying to give customers the ability to interoperate across all the toolkits.

developerWorks: What do you feel is the big IBM interest here? I mean, IBM is taking a leadership role with OpenAjax, and how does it dovetail with IBM's own product suite and its initiatives there?

Boloker: IBM for years has been on a path that it was very key to our customers that, No. 1: They allow their customers to have a very, very rich Web experience. Ajax is just basically a growth path for a lot of these customers, and that's why we started investing in this very early on. The other side of this is this allows our customers to basically jump on a technology that most browsers today already use. And as they're already using the technologies, these folks can immediately gain a lot from the enhanced user interfaces. One of the key problems you have on the Web is after you drop someone into reading one or two Web pages, by the time they get to the third Web page, chances are, they're not going to go any further. So you lose that transaction. And you know, there's been various studies on this, that by the third or fourth page, 60 percent of the people just go away.

developerWorks: Right.

Boloker: So what Ajax actually allows you to do is in a very, very nice way bring transparencies up on the same page. You no longer have to reload the page, that you can just reload sections of the page because you're delivering markup behind the scenes to the page and refreshing it, so you don't end up with, as I call it, that .... It used to be in the old days, and if you looked at 3270 technology, which very few of people probably even know what 3270s were, they used to be a write and a flash each and every time. And what's happening is, if you look in the Web terms is, that page gets refreshed from the server whenever you want to touch pieces of it. So you no longer have to do that with Ajax and do that refresh. So these are some of the important things that are happening as you look across it.

developerWorks: David, do you think two to three years from now we'll still be talking about Ajax, or will we have moved on to something else by then?

Boloker: Ajax is basically a means to the end. One can think of Ajax as a client companion to service-oriented architectures. And when I say that is you're looking at our next-generation applications that are being developed as we are speaking right now are all about mashups, dashboards, server push, mobile. And Ajax is going to basically be a lot of the user interface that you're going to see from there. So you'll end up with more productive end users. And for that matter, you'll end up with more productive developers when we get better tools and frameworks out there. Now, when you see what's going to happen is Ajax is actually part of the bigger picture, and in this case, the bigger picture is Web 2.0. And this is where you start thinking about, I have the crisp UI and I'm going to start tying it in with the pieces of social software like wikis and blogs, and you start saying, "Well, how about participatory software?" which you've already seen before in places like eBay and things like that where people participate and they vote on specific vendors. You look at how people are converging, and technologies are doing convergence, and as I said before, that whole concept of remixability of content. And in this case content can come from audio and video, as well as it can come off of, you know, XML feeds, RSS feeds, Atom feeds, and also can be screen-scraped off of ASCII devices of the old, if you want to call it the old age, or 3270-type devices. These things are far from dead, these devices, and a lot of information gets to be screen-scraped and has been screen-scraped, you know, for the last 20 years. So these are some of the key points of, you know, as you start looking at how to move forward, this is what Web 2.0 is all about.

developerWorks: So David, maybe the next obvious question is, where are we in terms of tools and resources around this technology? Where are we currently?

Boloker: Well, right now it's pretty hard to write Ajax because the tooling is immature, if there is tooling there in some cases. And the other piece of this is, you know, there are just pockets of tooling around. Now, all the commercial vendors typically have some tooling, but here's a place where my group in IBM has actually worked and built on top of the Web Tools Project, something called the Ajax Tooling Framework (ATF), which allows customers -- or allows anyone, for that matter -- to take the code down and use it immediately. They can write an app and in some cases, debug, and publish it all at once. And if you look at what our whole concept is inside of the ATF project, it's trying not only to look at doing it, debugging it and running it inside of just Firefox, but also into IE and Opera and others, also to say, well, the runtime can be anything you'd like it to be. Now, if it happens to be Java™, that's great, because we already have debugging facilities built in Eclipse for that. And if you're going to be PHP on the back end, well, we also have a PHP project that's recently been put into Eclipse and is moving forward. You can also do PHP debugging. So you can do the client-side Eclipse, use Eclipse rather for debugging of Ajax sessions, and you can also do the server side, all within one tooling framework.

developerWorks: We should mention that developerWorks has just recently launched the new Ajax resource center, which you can find a link to within the Open source zone on developerWorks. Talk a bit if you would about the value of that new Ajax resource center and how it can help folks get their hands around some of the stuff you've been talking about.

Boloker: So the whole concept of the resource center in developerWorks to me is extremely important as a resource for developers. "Come here -- find out all the information on the specific topic being Ajax. Find out all these possible links, all these great examples." And actually, also learn how to use Ajax and then start promoting it on their own Web sites. So this is great because if you think back to the beginnings of Java, we built on developerWorks a section for Java, and XML, and Web services, as well as other technologies. And each of these sections has been used just for that. And having a section that's for Ajax and Web 2.0 technologies will help propel the industry actually much faster forward. And you'll start seeing more Web 2.0 and Ajax-like apps appear, due to this.

developerWorks: That's a great plug, David. Thanks.

Boloker: But you know, to me, both alphaWorks and developerWorks are a great tool for most developers to start using to actually see in new technologies and how they're evolving.

developerWorks: David, thanks so much for your time. You've given us a lot of great information here today.

Boloker: And thank you.

developerWorks: Our guest again has been David Boloker, CTO of Emerging Internet Technology at IBM. For everyone at IBM developerWorks, I'm Scott Laningham. Talk to you next time.

Resources

• Ajax resource center on developerWorks
  
  
• OpenAjax Alliance
  
  
• Ajax Toolkit Framework on alphaWorks
  
  
• Ajax for developers series
  
  
• Mastering Ajax series
  
  
• developerWorks podcasts
  
  

About the author

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

Rate this article

Comments

Back to top

Table of contents

• Resources
• About the author
• Comments

Local resources

• IBM Innovation Center - Austin, TX
• IBM Innovation Center - Chicago, IL
• IBM Innovation Center - Dallas, TX
• IBM Innovation Center - San Mateo, CA
• IBM Innovation Center - Waltham, MA
• Technical Briefings in North America