AJAX alliance to start interoperability work

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Funny how, after an initial development rush, a community around a new technology will hit some interoperability issues, and then start to address it via some kind of specification initiative. AJAX, the browser-side interaction technique that brought you google maps, is in that phase right now.

Making Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) work smoothly matters, not only because it can help make webpages more engaging and responsive, but also because it is one of the most rapid ways to build front ends to web services.

It may seem a bit peculiar at first that there should be any AJAX interoperability issues at all, since it is built on a whole stack of existing, mature, open standards: the W3C’s XML and DOM for data and data manipulation, and XHTML for webpages, ECMAScript (JavaScript) for scripting and much more besides. Though there a few compliance issues with those standards in modern browsers, that’s not the actually the biggest interoperability problem.

That lies more in the fact that most AJAX libraries have been written with the assumption that they’ll be the only ones on the page. That is, in a typical AJAX application, an ECMAScript library is loaded along with the webpage, and starts to control the fetching and sending of data, and the recording of user clicks, drags, drops and more, depending on how exactly the whole application is set up.

This is all nice and straightforward unless there’s another library loaded that also assumes that it’s the only game in town, and starts manipulating the state of objects before the other library can do its job, or starts manipulating completely different objects that happen to have the same name.

Making sure that JavaScript libraries play nice is the stated aim of the OpenAjax alliance. Formed earlier this year, the alliance now has a pretty impressive roster of all the major open source projects in the area as well as major IT vendors such as Sun, IBM, Adobe and Google (OpenAjax Alliance). Pretty much everyone but Microsoft…

The main, concrete way in which the alliance wants to make sure that AJAX JavaScript libraries play nice with each other is by building the OpenAjax hub. This is a set of standard JavaScript functions that address issues such as load order and component naming, but also means of addressing each other’s functionality in a standard way.

For that to happen, the alliance first intends to build an open source reference implementation of the hub (OpenAjax Alliance). This piece of software is meant to control the load and execution order of libraries, and serve as a runtime registry of the libraries’ methods so that each can call on the other. This software is promised to appear in early 2007 (Infoworld), but the SourceForge filestore and subversion tree are still eerily empty (SourceForge).

It’d be a shame if the hub would remain vapourware, because it is easy to see the benefits of a way to get a number of mature and focussed JavaScript libraries to work in a single Ajax application. Done properly, it would make it much easier to string together such components rather then write all that functionality from scratch. This, in turn, could make it much easier to realise the mash-ups and composite applications made possible by the increasing availability of webservices.

Still, at least the white paper (OpenAjax Alliance) is well worth a look for a thorough non-techy introduction to AJAX.

When software becomes too social

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Here’s an idea that’s equal parts compelling and frightening: a presence service that is integrated not with a instant message client, but with your mobile’s contact book.

A presence service is the bit of an Instant Messaging (IM) application such as MSN, AIM or Yahoo Messenger that makes it possible to see which of your buddies is online, usually with a mood message thrown in (“bored”, “working from home” etc.).

It is what makes IM so compelling, to the point that many kids think email is just for old people (ars technica). Mobiles, of course, are not so stratified by age, but a quick glance in any public place in Western Europe will demonstrate that the under 25s are particularly attached to theirs. Hence the notion that tying presence information to a mobile’s contact list could prove to be very popular indeed with that crowd.

As befits the place, a couple of Finns have had that brainwave, and are now busy implementing it in, you guessed it, Nokia phones (Jaiku). More than that, they’ve clocked that a mobile can show much more “social peripheral vision” than simple presence online: it can also show location.

Once you’ve got that, you can let your imagination run riot. No more “I’m on the train” type conversations, because your mate can simply see that before even calling you. You could see how close, physically, your mates are to you when you look for them in a busy place. You can also see where all your mates are at any given point- like, all together, but not with you. And since these are mobiles, not PCs, even not seeing someone online can become quite significant.

With most modern tech, there’s usually a period of grace before abuse starts happening and rules are required. Think email before spam, or the web before people figured out how to make money on it. With this one, even the pioneers are keenly aware of the massive potential for abuse and a possible need to put some limits on the technology.

It might still prove too compelling to stop, though.

Patent front dispatch

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If you thought the Blackboard VLE patent was fun, there’s plenty more where that came from: 40.000 US software patents *per year* On the positive side, major IT companies are now clamouring for reform in the US and are signing ever more non-assertion declarations,  which rather exposes Blackboard. Meanwhile, some people in the EU Commission think that software patents might be a good idea after all.

One of the complaints about the Blackboard VLE patent case is that a thorough prior art search on either the history of the VLE (no education patents) or access control or a combination of the two could have seen the patent application thrown out or patent’s scope severely reduced.

If software patents are being awarded at a rate of 839 per day -which happened last month- the chances of a thorough process seem a little remote, though. It also means that the probability of a developer infringing any number of patents when writing any modest piece of code is fairly high. Particularly because these patents are written to be as vague and all-inclusive as possible.

This is commonly held to affect open source and small developers disproportionally (realgeek), since what matters is not whether you infringe a patent (because you will), but whether you’re likely to avoid a lawsuit about that infringement.

That, in turn,  depends on the size of your own war chest (i.e. patent portfolio) and the size of your legal budget, combined with the threat that you pose to someone who is bigger than you now. The Blackboard case illustrates the playground bully tactics of the process nicely.

That train of thought, however, doesn’t explain why the biggest hoarders of software patents are lobbying hard to check the madness and pledging not to assert patent rights over fairly important chunks of their intellectual property (IP).

IBM isn’t exactly a benevolent society, but it still pledged 500 software patents to the open source community and announced that it would provide royalty free access to thousands of patents that covered open interoperability standards in education and healthcare (IBM).

Now they’re making all of their patent applications available for public scrutiny well before they’re even granted (ars technica). Even IP rights champion extraordinaire Microsoft has pledged not to assert a bevy of its patents that are necessarily infringed by implementing a number of webservice specifications (Microsoft).

All of which makes Blackboard’s refusal to do the same with regard to educational interoperability standards on the grounds that it “could invalidate the claim” seem a little … quaint. To be sure, Blackboard have nowhere near as many patents to be generous with as the IBMs of this world, but there is something else going on.

Part of it may be a concern for the preservation of innovation and balance in the market. Another part could well have been prompted by the recent advances of the patent trolls: people with few assets and a couple of software patents. Not scared by threats of a countersuit, one such troll very nearly brought RIM’s BlackBerry to a standstill recently, and another extracted large sums of money from Microsoft.

In the US, this appears to be leading to more momentum behind patent reform (the register). In the EU, by contrast, you may be able to file for and receive software patents, but they are still formally disallowed. Long years of lobbying very nearly legalised them last year, but that was blocked by the European Parliament. Now another measure that’ll be voted on this month could both legalise them, and shift responsibility for them on the judiciary, rather than political institutions (ZDnet).