Project jMaki and a portal dedicated to AJAX developers were among announcements made by Sun Microsystems in its efforts to seize some high ground in the burgeoning AJAX development world.

"AJAX is increasingly becoming a core part of how next generation Web applications are built today, and we at Sun want to do everything we can to help developers learn about, and be productive using, this new pattern for development," said Dan Roberts (pictured), Director of Marketing, Developer Tools at Sun Microsystems. "Providing developers with a single source for everything from code samples and blueprints to tools and runtime support will greatly accelerate the learning curve and provide developers access to technology from Sun faster."

Sun has actually launched two new developer Web portals: developers.sun.com/ajax and java.sun.com/javascript. Sun says the first of this :includes everything developers need to get started with building AJAX applications today, including technical articles, code samples, blueprints, components, development tools, and runtime solutions. The second site provides developers directions on how Sun is working to embed JavaScript directly in the Java Platform.

In addition, Sun is also rolling out Project jMaki, an open source JavaScript Wrapper Framework for the Java Platform.  Project jMaki is a wrapper framework that allows developers to take JavaScript widgets from many popular AJAX frameworks, and wrap them into a JSP or JSF tag. This provides a Java Language view of JavaScript components.

Project jMaki can be found at http://ajax.dev.java.net.

Sun's announcements come in the same week that IBM announced 13 new members of its OpenAjax initiative; Sun is not among the participants in this effort to date.