A group of industry vendors and online businesses have revealed plans to promote the adoption of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) in the open source community.

Ajax is becoming increasingly popular with online businesses as a tool to update portions of a web page without refreshing the entire screen.

The rich internet application makes it unnecessary manually to refresh the browser to send or receive information over the web. Instead, information is automatically updated and available on demand.

Initial supporting members of the Open Ajax initiative include IBM, Mozilla, Google, Novell, BEA, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Laszlo Systems, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra.

The companies intend to promote Ajax's promise of universal compatibility with any device, application, desktop or operating system, and easy incorporation into new and existing software programs.

To enable rapid adoption of Ajax by the broadest community of software developers, IBM has proposed the contribution of its software to the Eclipse and Mozilla foundations that will allow them to develop and debug an Ajax application.

The proposed Eclipse Ajax toolkit framework is the first approach that supports multiple Ajax runtime toolkits from Dojo, OpenRico and Zimbra.

Zimbra has been developing Ajax applications for two years, and will make its Ajax runtime toolkit available to the community under Apache and Mozilla public licences.

Other community members are expected to be active in the future, with involvement from the Dojo Toolkit, an open source JavaScript library.