A prominent Java community member, Ben Galbraith has worked extensively with one of the technologies which is now being supported and made available through the Sun Web Developer Pack. "jMaki offers a compelling model for creating rich component-oriented Ajax interfaces in Java," said Galbraith. "It standardizes Ajax component interfaces, smoothly integrates multiple Ajax frameworks such as Dojo and YUI!, provides a powerful declarative event handling mechanism, and makes it easy to do mash-ups with its built-in and easily configurable proxy server. Before you start down the path of integrating some of the popular Ajax frameworks into your application, learn jMaki first."

The pack will be bundled into the Sun Java Application Platform SDK Suite update 3 preview which includes the GlassFish V2 Beta, available for download today. Available with a NetBeans plug-in, the Web Developer Pack enables developers to easily and rapidly deploy Web 2.0 applications and lightweight, dynamic code development. Check out the Sun Web Developer Pack at http://developers.sun.com/web/swdp.

Sun is also announcing the creation of a Java Specification Request (JSR) 311 focused on providing support for RESTful Web Services in the Java Platform working with other vendors such as BEA, Apache, Google, Jboss, TmaxSoft and Jerome Louvel (author of the Restlet project). This JSR will help further promote standardization around the next generation web technologies and will aim to provide easy-to-use API for developers for Java EE or Java SE platforms.