I've been meaning to blog about some of the work being done in the Ubiquity XForms project, and it took Carsten to complain about the amount of JavaScript in web application-level code to finally get me going.
The use of AJAX, not as application-level code, but as an infrastructure upon which to implement the semantics for a much better and standard set of abstractions for authoring Rich Internet Applications is beginning to be demonstrated by the Ubiquity XForms library. As JavaScript engines get 8 vertical cylinders, all that computing power can be put to very good use. The Ubiquity XForms library aims to implement the XForms 1.1 standard and make it available to all current web browsers, desktop and mobile. The set of technologies that XForms provides thereby become available to contribute to a standard rich web backplane.
Existing AJAX libraries such as Dojo and YUI play an important role, they provide the platform that Ubiquity XForms builds upon, in terms of widgets and not so visual bits like submissions and change notifications.
Obviously the library (abbreviated as UX) is open source -- its under Apache License 2.0, and has public developer, contributor and commit mailing lists.
Just coming out of the W3C Technical Plenary last week, UX was mentioned in the session on the 'Future of XML Ecosystem in W3C Client-Side Work' discussion as an interim way to look past some of the distributed extensibility limitations in HTML(5) :-) And speaking of the discussion, it was in my opinion the most well-received discussion in the entire plenary day, in so much as folks didn't mind continuing after a break when polled about it!
Back on topic, while UX is under active development, you can try simple examples right now (though they load excruciatingly slowly over SVN):
http://ubiquity-xforms.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/_samples/
The most important thing ofcourse is the source of the samples, so without a 'View Source' you haven't really seen anything.
