IBM proposes ATF Project to Eclipse

NEW DELHI: Big Blue has proposed the AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) Project to the Eclipse Foundation.

Lead by IBM's Craig Becker, project will provide extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for building IDEs for the many different AJAX runtime offerings like Dojo, Zimbra etc.

"The ATF framework will contain features for developing, deploying, debugging and testing AJAX applications. Tools built upon these frameworks will initially include enhanced JavaScript editing features such as edit-time syntax checking; an embedded Mozilla web browser; an embedded DOM browser and an embedded JavaScript debugger," says the proposal document.

ATF will use existing Eclipse extensions for web application deployment so that the environment will be "server agnostic" - that is, a developer may easily extend the framework to deploy their AJAX application to an arbitrary new class of server.

Initial adapters will include a J2EE / JSP adapter and an Apache / PHP adapter. An additional and unique aspect of the framework is the Personality Builder function, which assists in the construction of arbitrary AJAX runtime frameworks, thus allowing those runtimes to be used with ATF tools. Personality can be defined as a collection of IDE features that are specifically targeted to a certain AJAX Runtime Library.

The AJAX Toolkit Framework will be built using several Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project components and the WTP Server facilities to manage and configure Web Servers, said the proposal.

IBM will make major contributions to code which would include core functionality for the AJAX Toolkit Framework, and Enhanced JavaScript editing features, Integrated Mozilla environment including browser, a Personality Builder, ATF personalities for Zimbra, OpenRico, and Dojo etc.

First quarter of 2006, is the target for the launch of Initial Prototype version. Companies like BEA, Laszlo, Oracle, RedHat, Genuitec, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra have shown keen interest in the project.

For more information read: The AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) Project.