Rich Clients in a Browser - More about AJAX

I’ve been pretty busy over the last months (new project in another city) so this is my first post for a number of months.

However, since posting about AJAX and rich clients back in March a lot seems to be happening in trying to ease the burden of providing rich client functionally in a browser, i.e. people are creating JavaScript libraries. The following caught my eye:

script.aculo.us has a JavaScript library for creating user interfaces elements and functionality, such as drag and drop and auto-completing text fields.

Rico who as well as offering a number of visual effects also has a data grid which allows a HTML table to be connected to a data source.

Both of these are based on the Prototype framework which is a JavaScript framework which claims “to ease the development of dynamic web applications” and has functionality to ease the handling of XMLHttpRequest (one of the fundamental building blocks of AJAX).