SitePen: Passing the Open-Source Torch

SAN FRANCISCO—When companies such as Adobe, AOL, Eye-Fi, JPMorgan Chase, Sun Telelogic and even Google want a certain something in their Web applications, they go to SitePen, a Web application development shop that does a little support, training and consulting as well.

The reason these companies come to SitePen? The company has an all-star team of experts in AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), DHTML and Web 2.0 technologies. The company is a virtual who's who of AJAX stars, with CEO Dylan Schiemann and Alex Russell, SitePen's director of R&D, as co-creators of the popular Dojo Toolkit, an AJAX development library.

SitePen also features Joe Walker, creator of Direct Web Remoting, also known as DWR—a Java-based library for AJAX development—and Kevin Dangoor, the creator of TurboGears, a Python-based Web application framework. And that's just a short list of the Web 2.0 name brands employed at the company.

I met with Russell here and asked him how a small, distributed operation could attract and maintain so many hot commodities. He credited the open-source model.

"It's not like there's some secret to this," Russell said. "People want to work on things that matter to them, and insofar as SitePen is deeply intertwined with a number of pretty successful open-source projects, we wind up as people—not as the company, but as individuals—being incredibly identifiable inside those communities."

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