IBM announced that it will make another round of technology contributions to the open-source community to promote the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. At the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Oct. 4, IBM officials said the systems giant will make additional contributions to the Eclipse Foundation’s ATF (AJAX Technology Framework) and the Mozilla Foundation. IBM proposed the ATF project in January. The company then led the project and donated code to Eclipse to create ATF. Now the company says ATF project developers will work directly with IBM RAD (Rational Application Developer) 7.0 toolkit, which is slated for availability later in 2006. RAD 7.0, along with the ATF Toolkit, will give developers more advanced JavaScript tooling capabilities and end-to-end enterprise development using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the company said.IBM is contributing technology that will enable clients to run, deploy, debug and configure AJAX technology on any Web server, including WebSphere, Tomcat, Apache, JBoss and WebLogic, IBM officials said. And the technology brings new features to ATF, including enhancements to make it unnecessary to manually refresh a browser to send or receive information over the Web, IBM said. Click here to read more about IBM proposing its open-source AJAX project to Eclipse.Meanwhile, IBM contributed technology to Mozilla that will make for a more efficient Firefox browser for AJAX development and an easier interface for users, IBM said.David Boloker, IBM’s chief technology officer for emerging Internet technologies, gave a keynote speech at the AJAXWorld conference, where he said the combination of Web 2.0 tools and open-source communities are creating a “perfect storm” to enable new ways for organizations to collaborate with their users and constituents.”IBM believes the open technologies that make up Web 2.0 are essential drivers to help transform innovation and competitive advantage for our clients,” Boloker said, in a statement. “Many of these Web 2.0 tools are key ingredients for enabling greater communication between disparate groups, as well as improved efficiency and usability. “Added to an IT infrastructure based on a services-oriented architecture, savvy enterprises are leveraging open standards to facilitate Web 2.0 functionality for both the advancement of the industry and for individual businesses.” Meanwhile, IBM also announced that the company has opened a new Web development zone on its developerWorks community site. The Web development zone features technical resources for AJAX, PHP, ATOM, RSS and Ruby development, as well as for Web development frameworks such as Spring, Shale, Struts, Ruby on Rails, and Tapestry, IBM said. Check out eWEEK.com’s Application Development Center for the latest news, reviews and analysis in programming environments and developer tools.

By Darryl K. Taft