IBM donates code to secure Ajax mashups

IBM on Thursday said it is donating code for securing mashups to the Open Ajax Alliance, a group of vendors and open-source Ajax projects.

The software, called Smash (for secure mashups), is designed to make it easier to keep the sources of data separate in a mashup so that the application can't be hacked, according to IBM.

Better security for Web applications built with Ajax is generally a good thing.

For IBM, this is particularly important because the company is trying to build tools that let business users create their own mashup applications. Without better security, IT managers could block the use of these tools.

For more technical details, a blogger at Web application development and design firm Pathfinder Associates dug out an IBM research paper on Smash (click here for PDF).