Microsoft and Google have joined the OpenAjax Alliance, swelling the group's membership to 72 organisations, with a further 32 companies dedicated to developing and expanding the programming technique.

"Microsoft is joining the OpenAjax Alliance to collaborate with other industry leaders to help evolve Ajax-style development by ensuring a high degree of interoperability," said Keith Smith, a group product manager at Microsoft.

OpenAjax compliance provides benefits to IT managers and the Ajax developer community by encouraging integration of multiple Ajax products and technologies within the same web application, particularly with applications that use mash-up techniques.

Other benefits include greater certainty about product choices and reliability, lower training and development costs, and faster delivery of Web 2.0 innovations.

"After only 10 months this organisation has achieved significant milestones in defining interoperability standards for the industry," said David Boloker, OpenAjax Steering Committee chairman.

"Membership has grown from 13 to over 70 and the Alliance has published multiple white papers on the background technology and business benefits of Ajax.

"The group has also established task forces to investigate possible areas of new activity in security, IDE integration, server integration and client-side server communications.

"Our end-goal with all of these activities is to increase adoption and provide value to the software community on both technical and marketing fronts. "