The Zimbra Ajax Development Toolkit was expected to soon become the Apache Kabuki Ajax Toolkit. However Zimbra has now requested for the withdrawal of the Apache Kabuki project from incubation at Apache.

The Kabuki Proposal stated the rationale behind the project as "The open, standards based communications channel is what drives many technologies inside Apache, so success of the open client is vital to Apache. The mission of this project is to encourage innovation around enterprise-strength client runtimes and tools and build a community which can select and nurture a select set which will be most beneficial to the web."

The Zimbra withdrawal mail says "Due to the fact that the AJAX landscape has grown and changed so much since the start of the Kabuki project and from our discussions with the OpenAjax community, we have made the difficult decision to withdraw Kabuki from consideration for incubation at Apache.".

Andy Clark goes on to say that "Zimbra remains deeply committed to open source software and the open source community. The Kabuki project will continue to be freely available under the Apache license, the only difference that it will be hosted at Zimbra."

He concludes by saying "While we realize this decision may not be popular, we are convinced that this is the right thing to do for the OpenAjax Alliance, Apache, and Zimbra." You can read the entire mail here. Subject : "Withdrawing Kabuki from Apache Incubator", dated 24th June 06.

So if you were expecting Apache Kabuki to become a popular Ajax framework and compete with the likes of Dojo, that's unfortunately not happening.

* UPDATE: For some unknown reason, the news about Zimbra's request has disappeared from the news listing on the Kabuki page.

Related:
>> Seven Ajax Frameworks / Toolkits to watch out for
>> Ajax technologies aren't particularly new or sexy
>> Is AJAX worth adopting?
>> AJAX Security Threats and Performance Challenges
>> Apache's Java reflections on 2005

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