Sun Microsystems Inc kicked off the web 2.0 messaging during the keynote where it demonstrated an Ajax flavor of Sun’s Java Studio Creator.

On stage, Sun showed how you could use Studio Creator to create an orchestration of web screens, using BPEL that would in turn call services exposed from Java components. In this case, Sun used the typical Google Maps example, grabbing an Ajax code clip exposed as a reusable web service, to do a mashup showing local watering holes near San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

The common theme of these tools is to help Java developers create Ajax screens without having to drop down into coding JavaScript, which is probably Greek to most of them.

We previously described a tool from Google that offers a compiler that converts Java source code to JavaScript. Most of the other Ajax offerings, however, relied on another approach: using Java Server Faces (JSFs) to automatically spawn JavaScript and XML components.

Part of the Java EE 5 package of goodies first announced last year, JSF’s initial role in life was to simplify the deployment of Java Server Pages (JSPs) by wrapping them as part of larger grained components. That role seems now to have been commandeered by Ajax.

There seems to have been a spike in interest in JSFs due to Ajax, said John Crupi, CTO of JackBe, describing a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Without JSF, developers would have to perform roughly a dozen steps such as creating a JavaScript function to return an XML request over HTTP to the server, and creating another to process the XML response, associating the request to a state change of the user screen.

Backbase and Exadel provide examples of typical JSF-to-Ajax approaches. Having introduced its first browser client side creation tools back in 2003, Backbase introduced its first Ajax for Java edition.

They create a client side event manager, rather than simply spawning JavaScript widgets or visual controls. Similarly, Exadel, demonstrated a visual component designer that lets you specify a single JSF tag to generate an Ajax screen, or part of it.

JackBe, one of the tools providers, is a three-year-old company that just recruited three former members of Sun’s SOA development team to spearhead product development, is looking beyond the JSF with grander ambitions.

When we saw their [JackBe’s] solution, we saw an instant fit of Ajax and SOA, said Crupi, one of the Sun alums, who just joined the company a couple of months ago.

Although JackBe could not be specific about its roadmap, which is still under development, the direction is that Ajax can perform the final mashup of composite applications that are already aggregated by SOA.

In essence, we’re talking about a mashed up portal, said Crupi, who said that the company would probably be ready to disclose the roadmap by the summer.

Although Ajax was present all over the JavaOne floor, a few providers tilted at the windmills. During the keynotes, Sun extolled the exploding presence of NetBeans and boasted of performance improvement in Swing controls in the next release of Java Standard Edition 6 (Java SE 6), code named Mustang.

Canoo Engineering AG, a Swiss web development consulting firm, contends that Ajax runs out of gas much too easily.

Ajax’s libraries will take several years to catch up to Swing, which is already the standard, said Bruno Schaffer, CTO, referring to the libraries used by the NetBeans Java camp.

They demonstrated a Swing-based rich web client scrolling through a 10,000-row database. According to Schaffer, with Ajax, you would have to download the entire database to the client. By comparison, their Swing-based client was able to work with only the rows displayed on the client through a complex design pattern that splits the client representation between server and client.

Meanwhile, Oracle announced that it would donate Ajax components to the open source community, but it hasn’t yet designated which organization will be the lucky recipient.

With these components, you don’t code JavaScript but instead specify properties and event hamders, dragging and dropping Ajax components for app behavior, said by Thomas Kurian, Oracle senior vice president of server technologies development.

It was part of a larger announcement that also included support of SIP (Session Initiation protocol, the building block of Voice over IP) and IM components that could add a real-time communications splash to Web 2.0 Ajax screen.