Ajax has had a great underground following for some time now, and without standards it has been hard to develop any sort of workable frame work. Enter the open source community and IBM with the Open Ajax

“The goal of Open Ajax is to standardize around a common set of widgets, interfaces, and plug-ins to Eclipse so it can morph into an industrial strength rich web development environment. And with the standards, any Eclipse-compliant Ajax toolkit should be able to plug into any compliant Ajax run time, regardless of browser client or server deployment platform.”