ClearNova will announce this week its plans to open osurce its AJAX development environment ThinkCap by keeping a dual-licensing strategy with various pricing options. ClearNova's Vice President of Strategy and Evangelism Steve Benfield, who recently presented at a SYS-CON.TV hosted AJAX Webinar said:

"If you need to deliver apps to a mix audience--or you want to use a common set of programming techniques for your public and internal applications--then AJAX provides that. Any other downloadable medium does not although flash gets closer than anyone."

"First, entry level developers can't do much with AJAX to begin with. But they can use tools--as can intermediate and advanced developers. So what you'll see growing around AJAX are tools and frameworks--in droves."

"So, a better way to phrase the question is--can VB + PowerBuilder developers build their current apps without the tools they use--probably not. And even if they can, who wants to? It takes too long because hand-coding GUI is painful--something that is only for people that have too much time, bililng by the hour, or who have some very stringent functionality and/or performance goals.

"So, yes, I believe these programmers can build AJAX applications--with the right tools and frameworks."

"It is easy to say, just build it in Swing instead--but AJAX provides ubiquity across browsers with no special downloads--and it's backend independent. So you're free to choose a backend language and server whether its Java, PHP, .NET, Ruby, etc. Today, AJAX techniques can cover maybe 80% of the client/server GUI apps you might want to build. I predict more in the future."

Roger Strukhoff's exclusive SYS-CON.TV interview with Steve Benfiled can be found here.