ICEsoft Technologies, Inc., a provider of enterprise AJAX solutions, has announced a new chapter in the high-growth rich Internet Application (RIA) market. ICEfaces, ICEsoft's ground breaking AJAX development platform and one of the industry's most comprehensive enterprise solution for Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), is now available under open source license.

"Taking ICEfaces to an open source model is the result of a long and deliberate process for our company," said Steve Maryka, CTO of ICEsoft. "Over 30 man-years of research and development -- a process begun more than two years ago -- have been invested in creating ICEfaces. It has always been our intention to do this. The community has been asking for it, and here it is."

ICEfaces is the only integrated AJAX application framework for Java EE. ICEfaces extends JavaServer Faces, enabling Java software developers to more easily create and deploy thin-client rich Web applications in Java Technology. "Since the announcement of ICEfaces Community Edition in June of this year, ICEfaces has seen incredible momentum," explained Maryka. "ICEfaces is now being used by tens of thousands of enterprise Java software around the world. Through the open source model, ICEfaces now has the ability to become a de facto standard for rich AJAX application development within the Java technology community." ICEsoft is committed to the already thriving ICEfaces community and is also pleased to announce the debut of ICEfaces.org. Rich in technical resources, ICEfaces.org fosters open communication among the ICEfaces community, promoting development of ICEfaces projects and providing an umbrella for community support.

ICEfaces is professional grade open source software specifically engineered to meet the unique challenges of enterprise application development and deployment. ICEfaces leverages the entire standards-based Java EE ecosystem of tools and execution environments. The product resolves mission critical deployment issues such as scalability, availability, and redundancy. At the same time it delivers the most secured Ajax application model in the industry.

ICEfaces applications are Java technology based applications, not JavaScript applications. "ICEfaces was developed from the ground up as a standards-compliant solution for developing interactive and collaborative multi-user applications using Ajax Push technology," noted Maryka. "ICEsoft has been proud to pioneer this technology, which allows presentation changes to be asynchronously pushed from the application server to the browser client. ICEfaces' Ajax Push technology enables a new breed of rich enterprise applications that provide instant feedback to application users when server-side application events occur."

ICEfaces is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). "Our decision to go with MPL was based on our assessment of the unique needs of sustainable professional open source software," states Brian McKinney, president and CEO of ICEsoft. "First, we felt that we needed to use a license that was well understood by the open source community. Second, we wanted the license to reflect the spirit of open source in its treatment of developer acknowledgement and reciprocity. Third, we believed that the license needed to be clear and unambiguous in stating that end users not modifying the original code base -- that is, creating derivative works -- are under no obligation to open source their application code, and remain free to license their software under whatever commercial conditions they choose. After an extensive review of open source license models we determined that the MPL would best meet the spirit and needs of our vibrant open source development community."

This release of ICEfaces also includes much tighter integration with industry leading IDEs. Extensions have also been in the software release to facilitate integration with JBoss SEAM technology and to simplify integration with third party component libraries.

ICEfaces Open Source is available immediately for download. To download, go to http://www.icesoft.com/ or http://www.icefaces.org/ . Enterprise support options are available starting at an annual subscription price of $2,500/year. For more options visit: http://www.icesoft.com/products/icefaces_support.html