ActiveGrid Acquires TurboAjax and Stakes Out Dojo

Posted on September 16, 2007
Filed Under web 2.0 |

If you are steeped in Ajax development you will no doubt need no introduction to The Dojo Toolkit. If not, allow me to shed some light on this. Dojo is a open source DHTML toolkit written in Javascript, which for the non-geek audience means you can use it to quickly build rich web applications, and by “rich” I mean applications that have a lot of functionality in the UI that would normally take a developer a significant amount of time to develop or fall back into Flash.

Despite it’s capabilities, Dojo has some major problems, first among them is that it doesn’t have reliable commercial support so if you decide to use it you have to be prepared to fend for yourself. Quality of the interface widgets is another issue, simply put they have quirks, to put it kindly.

ActiveGrid is a company you will be hearing more about. Originally conceived as a grid computing vendor, to be honest I never really got their pitch… it was grid computing but developer tools. I always felt that the fact that they were open source was more important to them than anything else. The company has a new CEO, Chris Keene, and things are turning to be a little clearer.

The company’s updated messaging is clear: companies need to migrate legacy client/server apps (the homegrown kind) to modern web-based variants and the way to do that is to retool away from things like MS Access to visual development tools built on open and standard web technologies. It’s interesting to me that enterprise 2.0 is rapidly becoming a messaging cornerstone for a lot of vendors, interesting because it truly is a grassroots meme (props to Andy McAfee!)

Chris wrote a good post on his blog about the company’s acquisition of TurboAjax, a Dojo provider. His comments about their intentions say it better than I could:

  • Lack of commercial support: without the availability of commercial support, AJAX will not achieve enterprise adoption. With this acquisition, ActiveGrid will now stand behind both the TurboAjax products and the Dojo Toolkit.
  • Missing features: common complaints around the Dojo toolkit include lack of complete documentation and robust samples. If AJAX toolkits are to be adopted, they need the same polish as proprietary solutions like Flex.
  • Inconsistent standards: as the saying goes, the nice thing about AJAX standards is that there are so many to choose from. There is an alphabet soup of Javascript libraries out there, including JQuery, Prototype, Rico, Scriptaculous, Ext and YUI. Each of these takes a very different approach to solving the same problem.
  • Security: don’t even get me started on the security challenges in an environment full of widgets, gadgets and 3rd party web services. Suffice it to say that when this rock gets turned over, lots of ugly stuff creepy-crawly things will slither out.

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