"We’re dedicated to building the largest open-source community dedicated to RIAs, breaking down the barriers between traditional preferred languages, programming models and solutions, says the co-founder & CEO of Appcelerator, Jeff Haynie. To date Appcelerator has seen the strongest amount of interest from Java and PHP developers, Haynie notes, but the company has continued to see steady growth across Ruby, Python, Perl and .NET programmers as well.

The remarks come amid Haynie's responses to questions posed to him by Jeremy Geelan, Conference Chair of AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East in New York City this coming March (March 18-20, 2008).

The wide-ranging Q&A session also covers how Appcelerator's approach zeros in on the need for a clean separation the application from services in an agile development model by enabling the building of  "service-oriented UIs."

These SOUIs, as Haynie calls them, are clients designed to consume services, regardless of language or platform.

"We’re committed to building a community that can serve the needs of all developers, regardless of the technologies they want to use most," Haynie says. All of Appcelerator’s products are currently available under a GNU public license (GPL), he adds, and Appcelerator also provides customers with commercial licensing options based on their needs and requirements.

"What we’ve come up with is a fully-integrated RIA platform that enables developers to rapidly assemble RIAs, using an easy-to-learn Web Expression Language, widgets, SOA integration points and other open standards-based elements," Haynie explains. 

A key differentiator of the Appcelerator platform, he says, is that you can develop RIAs that work on any platform, and in any browser, using the skills you already have – with a particular focus on helping enterprises develop RIAs that seamlessly integrate with, and extend the value of their SOAs.