Zimbra Withdraws Ajax Framework Proposal from Apache Incubator

A few of the things we’ve learned:

1. Most parties in the OpenAjax initiative believe one sweet spot for AJAX toolkits will be for augmenting existing HTML pages. This is a more evolutionary approach that provides a more generic fallback in terms of accessibility, legacy clients, and so on. So a key constituency is the “HTML design center”, and today we believe Dojo to be a better choice for HTML developers than Kabuki.
2. At least some of the Java UI developers prefer to continue to do their coding work in Java and then map the resulting application to Javascript for deployment. This is the model at the heart of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), which is directly targetted at the “Java design center”, and is now available under the Apache license.
3. Kabuki, which targets object-oriented programming in Javascript, retains its sweet spot for developing more revolutionary AJAX applications (”Javascript design center”) that seek to take the full advantage of the browser’s capabilities in native Javascript.

We think that Kabuki is an ideal fit for a certain class of Ajax solutions but not for others. As such, we expect Kabuki to co-exist with Dojo, GWT, and others. We now agree with other members of OpenAjax that a peer relationship between these projects is best. We feel that this approach facilitates sharing and collaboration and is better than an approach where one project has a special relationship with Apache while others do not.