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Today, we are really excited to be able to announce a big personal change. Ben and I are joining forces, full time, for the first time. What are we doing? We are joining Mozilla to create a new group with the charter to create developer tools for the Open Web.

Mozilla is placing a big bet, not only on us, but in the developer tools space.

Why are we doing this? Ben and I are passionate about a couple of things: compelling software and developers. In various roles in the past, we have built tools that attempt to make developers productive. We are huge advocates for the Open Web, yet we feel that tools are lacking on our collective platform. We want to help make a difference.

As we ramp up this new group, we will be looking at the problem and seeing where it makes sense to step in. We are going to be experimenting, and thinking about how to make developers lives better in different ways, so we aren’t expecting to see traditional tools come out of this group. Also, we don’t want to do this alone. We want to involve the entire community which is one reason that we are so excited to kick off this work at Mozilla. We believe that we have a unique opportunity to put developers first. We can build these tools in the open, with total transparency; the Mozilla way.

We respect the work being done by other vendors, and very much want to work together. We can’t wait to reach out early-on in the process, involving companies that believe in the Open Web like we do. Together we can drastically improve productivity, allowing developers to build compelling user experiences.

We are just getting started. As soon as we come up with some ideas, we will be sharing then with you and asking for community participation in various forms. You, the Ajaxian community, have been phenomenal over the years, and we can’t wait to do more together.

For our personal takes, see what I saidand Ben thought.

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

A simple command-line tool to create the folders and helper files for a new JavaScript project/library. As a bonus, you can quickly create a website to promote your project.

When you start a new JavaScript library, how do you layout the source files, the tests, the distribution files? Do you have support scripts to generate distributions from source files? Run your JavaScript unit tests? Generators to create new unit test HTMLfiles?

jQuery UI is a set of themable widgets and interactions, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications.

This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Mapsand Gmaileasy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Javaprogramming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.