InfoWorld has covered a number of excellent proprietary AJAX toolkits in the past, and now we're turning our attention to some of their open source rivals. Are they worth exploring for enterprise use?

The open source toolkits I examined span a wide range of what might be covered by the term AJAX, an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML that began appearing little more than a year ago. The idea of using JavaScript with or without XML to add intelligence and interactivity to a Web page dates from the earliest days of the Web, and AJAX is now one of the best ways to distribute client applications with a minimal amount of fuss. (See more on the intricacies of AJAX athttp://www.infoworld.com/2257).

If you're interested in whether these open source packages compete with the best commercial tools, the simple answer is: not in general but sometimes in specific details.

The best-known proprietary packages, such as Backbase (http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/08/32TCback_1.html), JackBe (http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/24/26TCjackbe_2.html), an d Tibco's General Interface (http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/10/31/44TCtibco_1.html), all offer complete development environments with full toolkits, sophisticated event models, and debuggers. With them, you can write applications that run in the limited environment of a Web browser but offer almost all of the features of native code. (See more on proprietary AJAX tools we've reviewed athttp://www.infoworld.com/article/06/07/31/31FEajaxsb_1.html.) None of the open source packages I looked at come close to the range, depth, and support of these commercial packages.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't plenty that's worthwhile in these open-source AJAX projects -- there's an explosion of interest in the area right now.