jMaki was launched by Sun a couple years ago to find a way to reuse Ajax widgets that have been proliferating in the wild. While the more recently-formed OpenAjax foundation has focused its efforts on defining what will be, in essence, a traffic hub, Sun was looking for a set of common naming conventions and descriptors so you could call up Ajax widgets that come from different sources.
For now Sun has set its targets on three families of Ajax widgets, including those from the Dojo Foundation, Yahoo, and Scriptaculous.
Like other Ajax toolsets and frameworks that are now proliferating, jMaki provides a JavaScript runtime. It also provides communications mechanisms such as publish/subscribe to JavaScript assets; CSS (cascading style sheet) layouts and templates; a widget model based on basic HTML templates, CSS, and JavaScript; and mechanisms for listening to JavaScript assets that are available via publish/subscribe and inject JavaScript content from external URLs.
It also provides a server runtime that makes sure that makes sure all CSS and JavaScript dependencies are rendered only once in a given page.
Obviously, given the proliferation of Ajax toolsets, Sun is not the only provider offering the JavaScript runtime building block. But it is an attempt to help non-JavaScript programmers, such as Java developers, to code their way through the Ajax world.
Sun is also adding jMaki support for PHP, and hopes to have fuller support for Ruby once it adds the capability to listen for external events, such as RSS feeds.
