When TIBCO General Interface 3.1 was released last month, it came with a bold new licensing and pricing model. When TIBCO Software Inc co-founder Kevin Hakman (pictured) speaks at the "Real-World AJAX" One-Day Seminar at New York's Marriott Marquis Hotel Times Square, NYC, on Monday March 13 he will speak with similar boldness. The title of his presentation? "The Four Quantum Stages of AJAX."

Since TIBCO General Interface version 3.1 Professional Edition was made available from February 13 to build and test AJAX-enabled applications for free - with developers and organizations of any type paying nothing to deploy publicly - it is highly appropriate that Hakman should be unleashing his presentation just one month on, to the day.

While the strictest definition of AJAX addresses only communications, Hakman will explain how the term is being used more loosely to describe a new class of more richly-featured GUI component and a class of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that require no plug-ins, Active-X controls, applets, or other technology to supplement the browser while achieving functionality and performance that is comparable to desktop-installed applications.

"AJAX is being applied to everything from simple communication scripts to full-blown RIA development and deployment frameworks," Hakman - who pioneered AJAX in the enterprise co-founding General Interface in 2001 - will note:

"One of the problems with the term 'AJAX' is that, strictly speaking, the concepts underlying the acronym do not encompass a graphical user interface. Tightly defined, AJAX simply describes a technology that transports information to and from the browser and not how that information is displayed. To purists, AJAX is about communicating asynchronously from the browser using JavaScript and XML, nothing more."

"To others," he will continue, "through their experiences with Google Maps and Yahoo!’s new email offering, AJAX represents a desktop-like GUI that leverages the pre-existing HTML, DHTML, and vector-based rendering capabilities of the browser. When they speak of AJAX ... they mean the rich user interactivity of the desktop -not just background communications."

It’s likely that developers will continue to use the term for a broad spectrum of uses.

As for TIBCO General Interface itself, unlike most Web development tools that require additional software such as plug-ins, Active-X controls or Java applets to be installed or added to the browser, it works with the existing capabilities of the browser, enabling users to get a full featured application instantly from a URL.

Based upon five years of proven enterprise deployments, TIBCO General Interface in its 3.1 release introduced faster drag-and-drop visual authoring tools for standard XML & XSD, SOAP and WSDL communications, as well as HTTP/S GET and POST operations, dramatically reducing scripting time.

In addition, users from February 13 gained access to the TIBCO General Interface Developer Community, an existing online resource currently used by thousands of developers.

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