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AJAX gurus head new Mozilla developer tools lab


By Alex Handy
November 6, 2008 — 
For AJAX users in the know, Ajaxian.com is near the top of the list of helpful sites on the cutting edge. Perhaps that's why the Mozilla Foundation has recruited Ajaxian co-founders Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith to spearhead the next generation of Mozilla Web development tools.

In a recent statement to SD Times, Almaer and Galbraith outlined possible areas of focus for the new Mozilla developer tools lab. Many of them center on propagating and fostering support for open Web standards.

The pair began by describing the current woes of Web developers: “Because the open Web platform consists of a diverse ecosystem of browsers from different companies and organizations, developers are quite often forced to correlate a variety of inconsistent documentation from many sources in order to answer basic questions. (This problem has been compounded by the emergence of many popular w:st="on"AJAX frameworks, each of which add their own inconsistent documentation to the mix.) By order of contrast, proprietary platforms like Sun's Java, Microsoft's .NET and Adobe's Flex all have excellent and [organized] documentation.”

Almaer and Galbraith wrote that they are “now looking at this systematically to see what more can be done to improve the situation for everyone, and as comprehensively as possible. We want to answer the question, ‘How can we work with all the documentation required for open Web developers to be productive and bring it together in one place as a cohesive set of information?’ ”

Another problem, according to Almaer and Galbraith, is the relatively steep learning curve associated with open Web standards. “The core strength of the open Web is its very openness, the ability of developers worldwide to jump in and contribute,” they wrote. “Yet we feel the barriers to participation are often significant. Each open-source project works differently, and it's often not clear how newcomers can contribute code that is eventually accepted.”

Despite the pair’s confidence that new tools can address those problems, when and how such tools will surface remain to be seen. “While at this stage we haven't narrowed our focus to any specific solutions to these problems (or even decided that these are the problems we'll wind up tackling at first), these are the issues that most loom on our radar,” wrote Almaer and Galbraith. “We're anxious to talk to Web developers to get more of their perspective too.

“The browsers are picking up a lot of momentum and adding a lot of new functionality to the Web these days. Now it is time for the tools to catch up.”


Related Search Term(s): AJAX, Web development, Mozilla


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