A poll on Ajaxian.com had response showing that the overwelming majority of respondents were using Open Source ajax libraries. The most popular libraties are Prototype,JQuery and Extjs. The only proprietary solution with significant response was Backbase.

Extjs' rise in popularity is impressive, as is Jquery's. Also of note is the quasi-disappearance from the responses of popular early players as xajax and Rico.

Though this poll is no scientific truth or statistically representative (open source enthousiats are more likely to visit Ajaxian than some corporate developer coding only for the money), with more than 2000 respondents it still give an idea of some trends.

The Dojo foundation has released version 1.0 of the Dojo javascript toolkit. Dojo is one of the most complete javascript toolkit available, with of course ajax functionalities but also internationlisation, cryptography, offline capabilities and a widget system. It supports Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers.

It is used in products by AOL, BEA, IBM and Sun amongst others.

The Observatoire du Logiciel Libre published its latest report on the Free and Open Source software market in the enterprise, based on training organised for professionals. Although the conclusions cannot be considered as definitive because based on only one company providing trainings, the data unveiled can be used as one indicator of what is currently going on in the market.

The report is in french, but here are the trends comparing the first half of 2007 with the same period in 2006:

• The number of people trained rose 20%. The LAMP stack is still very popular, but the growth of Linux training slowed (+1% only), and the report attributed this to the arrival of Windows Server 2003.
• the trainings delivered become broader, becoming less technical, with for example trainings for SugarCRM and Jaspersoft's reporting solutions.
• Mysql, part of the LAMP stack, keeps growing with 40% more people trained
• Java is still popular, with a progression 66% more people trained
• Postgresql trainings number is stable. Postgresql seems to be used in more established companies and by specialists, relying on its most advanced features like PostGIS.
• the number of trainings delivered about OpenOffice stumbled by 80%. The report mentions that a lot of companies a getting OpenOffice directly, without trainings.

The last point would be worth further investigation: are companies really interestedin OpenOffice without trainings? Or do they have internal experts who deliver training inside the company?

Source: Toolinux

jMaki is a client/server framework to ease development of Ajax applications, and it abstracts much of the javascript and CSS needed while covering several javascript libraries as Yahoo's YUI, Dojo and Scriptaculous. jMaki is made of both client side components (layout, client services and runtime as well as a widget model) and server side components ( server runtime and XmlHttpProxy).

Quickstart guides are available for Java and PHP, but efforts are also underway to make it available in Ruby on Rails

Version 1.0 of jMaki is now available for download.

Google Web Toolkit 1.4 has been released. GWT is a tool to develop AJAX applications in Java. You don't write any Javascript: it gets generated from your Java code thanks to a Java to Javascript compiler. When in "hosted mode" your app runs on the Java Virtual Machine, which gives you access too all available Java debugging tools and techniques. This release is a major upgrade, and features improved performance.

Project Zero is an incubator project started at IBM. It is focusing on agile development, with the core system written in Java, but the applications' code written in a supported scripting language, currently Groovy and PHP. It is a REST oriented and event based system. The prefered development environment is Eclipse.

Yui Compressor, as the name wouldn't suggest, is not working only on YUI, but is a general javascript compressor based on Rhino, the Javascript interpreter implementation in Java, included in Java 6.

Tibco today announced the release of PageBus, a message bus implemented in JavaScript that enables disparate Ajax elements in a Web page to broadcast and listen for events and messages published on topic names.

If you're interested in this functionality, you can also take a look at YUI's custom events.