Chief among the detractors to widespread AJAX adoption is the complexity of the coding necessary to create its seemingly seamless facade. The fledgling paradigm’s browser dependence, melange of underlying technologies, and inherent component reliance require a versatile skill set and architectural acumen hard to come by. And, as Coach Wei, founder of Nexaweb and a member of the OpenAjax Alliance’s newly elected steering committee, notes, “While companies like Google and Yahoo can afford to hire the best engineers to build amazing applications using Ajax and have truly opened the eyes of the mass, typical enterprises do not have the capability to do so.”But with upstarts like Zoho — rumored to be unveiling its newly bundled Zoho Virtual Office tomorrow at Office 2.0 — leveraging the model to take on industry stalwarts, the potential competitve edge promised by AJAX cannot be ignored. Not to mention the improved end-user experience, responsiveness, and scalability possible in adopting an AJAX-based approach to in-house application problems. And yet what to do when the mountain comes not to Mohammed? How to gain the in-house expertise necessary to deliver on the promise? Helmi Technologies purports a possible answer in the form of its Open Source RIA Platform, launched today in beta. By enabling Java developers to create enterprise-class AJAX-based rich Internet applications without requiring expertise in JavaScript, XML, et al, Helmi hopes to capitalize on the au current desire to serve up AJAX solutions, while at the same time doing its part to mitigate the noise effect of overeager, less-fluent enterprise adoptors — and to do so in a way that fits with companies’ current developer rosters.Although one would hope the OpenAjax Event Hub will go far in resolving the effect of early adoption complexity, companies may soon be leaning heavily on platforms such as Helmi’s to facilitate the creation of AJAX-based applications and components. Adobe’s Flex 2.0 already provides a formidable proprietary iteration for creating rich Internet apps. Does a comparable open source equivalent for AJAX await? Can such efforts effectively expand the set of developers working with the AJAX model? More to the point, How will the AJAX paradigm evolve with more, though perhaps less technologically fluent developers at the table? Technology Industry