"[AJAX] has taken on a life of its own," he said. "It was a train leaving the station with or without [vendors]."

Microsoft weighs in

Microsoft Corp. upped the AJAX ante last year when it said it would support the technique as an alternative to Windows Presentation Foundation, its Vista rich client, Baer said.

"There was a genuine fear that Microsoft could eventually just co-opt this technology and add its own extensions, which would ruin one the beauties of AJAX -- it runs on every browser," Baer added.

IBM plans to propose to the Open AJAX group that its AJAX Toolkit Framework be contributed to The Eclipse Foundation and to Mozilla Corp., which oversees development of the open-source Firefox Web browser, said Rod Smith, vice president of emerging technologies at IBM.