Ariba doubled down on its commitment to open source, announcing an open source release of AribaWeb, the company's framework for the creation of rich Internet applications.

Some of Ariba's motivation for delivering the open source version of the framework was the desire to give back to the community as a measure of appreciation for the success the company has enjoyed there.

"As one of the first companies to push Java applications to enterprise scale, Ariba has been a longtime adopter and beneficiary of open source technology," Ariba CTO Bhaskar Himatsingka said. "With the open source release of AribaWeb, we see the opportunity to give back to the community in a significant way."

Company officials have admitted in the past that AribaWeb has always been the secret sauce behind the company's spend management application user interfaces.

One of the big advantages now for open source corporate and third-party developers with the new version is Auto Ajax. Ariba officials note that Ajax has been the accepted way of creating rich Web applications, but the implementation of those applications typically involved costly hand coding of JavaScript code.

"Now Ajax user interfaces are produced automatically, and without requiring application developers to perform any client-side scripting," noted Craig Federighi, Ariba's user interface technology evangelist.

An advantage open source developers now have access to is the Instant App capability built into AribaWeb, which company officials said eliminates the need for code. With just a basic set of user interface-agnostic Java domain class libraries, AribaWeb can apply all the necessary rules to the available metadata to generate a fully functional application.

Another capability now available to the open source world is AribaWeb's Live Edit and X-Ray capabilities. The latter function allows developers to "see through" running application user interfaces, which gives them visibility into the active hierarchy of components under the covers.

Live Edit equips developers with drag-and-drop capabilities so they can redesign the user interface and property sheets so they can changes rules from within the browser, company officials explained.

Available now, AribaWeb will be sold under the Apache Open Source License v2.

Another company wrangling with open source is Microsoft. InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on overhauling Microsoft. Download the report here (registration required).