Technology works with company's General Interface product Tibco Software is debuting on Monday an open-source test tool for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications built with the company’s General Interface toolkit.The Tibco General Interface Test Automation Toolkit takes care of the labor-intensive process of quality assurance testing of asynchronous communications, JavaScript and XML components, and rich Internet applications, Tibco said. Downloadable here, the toolkit builds on the open-source Selenium Core test tool for Web applications and runs in a browser.“Once developers are building an application in AJAX, the QA department needs to test. So this is a tool for QA engineers to build automated tests that run General Interface AJAX applications,” said Kevin Hakman, director of product marketing for Tibco General Interface. Users can develop automated test cases and run scenarios to validate an application’s performance. Applications that are subsequently changed can be retested with the same library of test cases.AJAX applications are growing in maturity, Hakman said. The Web application development technique is being used in markets like financial services and transportation, he said. The General Interface toolkit also can be leveraged in SOA because it has provisions for SOAP and XML, he said.Although Tibco is giving away its testing toolkit, the company looks to earn money off of it through selling support and service programs and enticing users to try out the company’s commercial SOA offerings, such as ActiveMatrix. Tibco’s General Interface AJAX toolkit received rave reviews from a presenter at The ServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas last week.“You can build really powerful apps all through JavaScript,” said Ben Galbraith, cofounder of the Ajaxian Web site. He also said General Interface offers the richest set of widgets he has seen and expressed surprise that the product was free.General Interface was offered up to open source last October. Since then, the installed base has jumped from 10,000 users to about 100,000, Hakman said. Software Development