News : Microsoft, Google Join OpenAjax Alliance

What is fast becoming one of the computing industry's most diverse consortiums of competitors will meet tomorrow at IBM's offices in New York, for the first time with Microsoft as a contributing member. The OpenAjax Alliance is seeking to develop a standard specification for Asynchronous JavaScript, which can now also count Google among its ranks, after having co-founded the Alliance but having held out on its decision to officially join...for reasons some speculate may have had to do with Microsoft.

For all intents and purposes, Google and Microsoft are AJAX, with Google having led the way in promoting the concept of JavaScript code that isn't bound to browser-based events. The freely distributed Google Web Toolkit (GWT) provided most Web developers' first introduction to document object models that could be amended on the fly. Microsoft came along not long afterward with its betas of "Atlas," which have since been pulled in under the ASP.NET umbrella.