InfoWorld: Surveying open-source AJAX toolkits - Analysis
Surveying open-source AJAX toolkits | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2006-07-31 | By Peter Wayner:
The open source toolkits I examined span a wide range of what might be covered by the term AJAX, an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML that began appearing little more than a year ago. The idea of using JavaScript with or without XML to add intelligence and interactivity to a Web page dates from the earliest days of the Web, and AJAX is now one of the best ways to distribute client applications with a minimal amount of fuss.
Peter Wayner finds the Dojo toolkit to be of great interest.
It’s not necessarily better in any particular way than the others, but it is both broad and deep with a big selection of very customizable widgets. These traits may explain why both IBM and Sun have recently signed on to support the Dojo Foundation and its work.
eDevil’s weblog has an exhaustive post about AJAX libraries.
I have also experimented with xajax and found it to be very useful. This is different from the other AJAX toolkits mentioned in the article as it is tightly integrated with php.
From xajaxproject.org:
The xajax PHP object generates JavaScript wrapper functions for the PHP functions you want to be able to call asynchronously from your application. When called, these wrapper functions use JavaScript’s XMLHttpRequest object to asynchronously communicate with the xajax object on the server which calls the corresponding PHP functions. Upon completion, an xajax XML response is returned from the PHP functions, which xajax passes back to the application. The XML response contains instructions and data that are parsed by xajax’s JavaScript message pump and used to update the content of your application.