MobUser

With the success of Google and other sites that have used AJAX style UIs to their advantage, an upsurge in AJAX frameworks and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are in big demand. To illustrate the point, Yahoo and Google have both created Open Source AJAX frameworks that extend their core services to the developer community. Suffice it to say that RIA and AJAX are the foundation upon which web sites will be created for the conceivable future. What is interesting to me is that many of these sites today are looking for mobile solutions.

What is most interesting is that all of the successful RIA frameworks available today are available as Open Source. The companies offering the frameworks vary as widely as the business models that back them up. Yahoo and Google offer their frameworks as OSS to build brand equity with the developer community; StartUps offer OSS frameworks that are commercialized with Tools, Literature, Support, and Consulting Services. One constant however is that these frameworks are being adopted at an amazingly high rate.

Mojax is a best-in-class solution that is positioned to lead the convergence of Web based Rich Internet Apps and Mobile by leveraging technologies that are de-facto standards in the Internet space today (AJAX, Javascript, CSS and XML). This begs the question, “Should Mojax be open source?”

Personally I’ve always been a big supporter of Open Source software. After all, why pay for software AND support when you can just pay for support (or nothing at all!). I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to change “just one little thing” about a product but couldn’t … to say nothing of the countless hours spent trying to understand why something wasn’t working and the only recourse was to decompile a product to find out what was wrong with it.

In the case of mobile software the challenge of releasing a commercial grade solution is further encumbered by the multitude of devices, programming languages, compilers, and carrier “constraints” you have to work through. Open sourcing would provide an interesting way of dealing with these issues. For example, developers in a geography that we don’t have plans to support could decide to “port” the MRE (Mojax Runtime Environment) to the devices in their region. Another example is of an individual developer with a desire to have software for their new phone could try it out and provide us with feedback. It is even possible that, with access to source code, 3rd party developers could provide extensions for the platform that we either did not think to add or could not justify from an R&D perspective.

At this point there are no immediate plans to Open Source Mojax … though this is a very active topic at mFoundry … one that I will likely find myself writing about again in the future.