Eclipse Foundation Looks at AJAX

JavaScriptSearch
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; 03:00 AM

Two projects of the Eclipse Foundation (www.eclipse.org) aim to provide the Eclipse community with tools to create AJAX web applications.  One is the Rich AJAX Platform (RAP), the other is Ajax Tooling Framework (ATF).  Both are yet to be created, although ATF has just passed its creation review, and RAP exists in the form of a proposal.

ATF is now part of the Web Tools Platform (WTP) project at Eclipse.  It aims to extend the Eclipse platform with tools for J2EE web development.  WTP includes editors for JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XML, as well as a plethora of other tools, needed for web development.  According to ATF's development plan, the second quarter of 2006 is dedicated to processing input from the developing community to enhance functionality.  Support for the project has been expressed by IT industry leaders, including Yahoo, BEA, IBM, and Oracle. 

The second AJAX-related project, RAP, focuses on an AJAX web runtime, while ATF focuses on tools to write applications for AJAX runtimes. RAP is an open source project, and development plans call for first release in  mid-2007.

As JS Search reported, recently Microsoft showcased its own "Atlas" AJAX-style platform.  A preliminary demo of the "The Eclipse  Way of  Web 2.0", is available at http://rap.innoopract.com/webworkbench/W4TDelegate.

Eclipse's commitment to AJAX-related tools is not a surprise.  Many major web and IT companies have dedicated considerable effort to acquiring AJAX products or creating AJAX plaftorms.  It would suffice to mention Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft, whose energetic moves for controling web presense are at least in part fueled by the vast, and growing, popularity of AJAX-driven websites.