The OpenAjax Hub is one of the first deliverables of the OpenAjax Alliance. It is meant to prevent the kinds of conflicts that are otherwise inevitable in a loosely-structured environment that relies primarily on relatively unstructured JavaScript.
Such conflicts are especially likely to occur when you mash up widgets from separate web pages, each of which was designed using a different Ajax tool with different JavaScript libraries. For instance, different JavaScript widgets could target the same DOM (Document Object Model) web page component. Or, if two widgets use the same global variable, they could wind up overwriting each other.
The hub is intended to play traffic cop. It includes a way for compliant Ajax tools to register there components, which enables the hub to assign a unique name. It then manages objects that are added to the JavaScript runtime environment to prevent event handling collisions. It also provides a pubsub mechanism where libraries can publish and, in turn, subscribe to events that trigger them.
Nexaweb is supporting a pre-release version of the hub. Wei expects that it will be tweaked to reduce its footprint and improve performance by the time the 1.0 version comes out which he expects to happen in the summer.
