AOL has announced its continued involvement with and support of the Dojo Foundation, by hosting the recently launched Dojo version 0.3.1 to help further AJAX and JavaScript adoption in the open source community.

According to Forrester Research, open source usage is quickly increasing. When surveying North American customers in 2005, 56 percent were already using open source software and another 19 percent said they planned to use it in the coming year. The adoption has taken off so quickly that today, 55 percent of companies in North America say they use open source software in "mission-critical" applications.

"We are pleased to be furthering AOL's support of open source initiatives through our contributions to the Dojo JavaScript toolkit, especially as we've benefited so much from our own increasing adoption of key open source platforms and standards," said Sree Kotay, senior vice president, AOL Technology. "The Dojo Foundation is deservedly recognized throughout the industry for making web development projects not only faster to develop, easier to understand, and richer, but at commercial and professional quality grades, and we are proud to be one of their key sponsors."

"AOL's contributions to the Dojo toolkit have made a significant impact on our ability to develop new and interesting features, helping us connect with a broader user base," said Alex Russell, project lead for the Dojo Toolkit and president of the Dojo Foundation. "We're tremendously excited about AOL's involvement in the project and look forwarding to continuing work with them to deliver better UIs and tools."

Since February 2006, AOL has provided significant contributions to the Dojo Toolkit, an open source JavaScript toolkit, to help make web development faster and easier. AOL's contributions include:

-- Hosting releases of Dojo, including the most recent version 0.3.1, on the Content Distribution Network for use by any web site;
-- Submitting cross-domain Dojo package loading code;
-- Contributing bug fixes;
-- Donating a JavaScript Compiler tool, which analyzes JavaScript code and conducts operations on that analysis, such as strip unused code or provide metrics on call patterns;
-- Acting as a founding member and contributor to the Dojo Accessibility Working Group.

In addition to contributing to the Dojo Toolkit, AOL has also committed to a large-scale usage of Dojo by using it in AOL products such as AIM(R) Pages (www.aimpages.com) and featuring its technology on the I AM Alpha site (http://developer.iamalpha.com/).