I was wondering if anyone had played around with doing PHP and AJAX using either SAJAX or CPAINT...

I did a very small amount and then realized I hated AJAX because of how complex it winds up becoming(I was doing this without a toolkit). Let me know if you wind up using either of those and find it useful - I just need something to abstract away the awfulness of the asychronous calls

I tried out CPAINT last Friday and was able to put together an example of what I was trying to accomplish pretty quickly. The only thing that slowed me down was I had forgotten how cranky PHP gets about output buffering

AJAX sounds great but the technology has been around for ages......its not particularly complex but it is annoying.

I prefer flash remoting over AJAX, plainly because the documentation is there for the API's etc

Also I heard a while ago (in the summer) Microsoft were working on an API for the .NET platform that allowed .NET developers to great AJAX powered apps but using .NET classes etc....not heard anything since with all the Vista stuff taking precedence.

Just wondering where you both are now with your AJAX development. I've suddenly gotten bitten by the AJAX bug. So many possibilities, and since I'm all for user friendliness (like any good software developer would be or rather should be or any mac user really :p)... I really want to hop on the AJAX boat ASAP. So many things I want to get done with it. But problem really is documentation like g_barnett said, I know partly this is because AJAX is really a combination of technologies, and there are a number of uses and possibilities. But....

I recently picked up Ajax and my opinions of it are nothing but good.

Two important things to keep in mind:

- it's easy
- you already know how to do most of it

Most Ajax implementations are just a bit of javascript that, on a given trigger, open an off-screen connection to a page of XML, HTML, ASP, CF, PHP, etc.

For example, an auto-complete text box is just a script that gets called every time the contents of the textbox are changed. The java script opens a connection to something like http://mysite.com/getOptions.php?testBoxValue=valuehere
That script does all the server-side work and gives Javascript some output to write to the screen.

Take a look at http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/default.asp

It's a very short, easy to understand tutorial. It'll help if you've used Javascript in the past, but if you haven't it's still not too hard.

Also, Ruby on Rails has 1 line Ajax...IF you're like me, and don't like writing a lot of JavaScript, Rails is pretty cool, not to mention it comes with AUtocompleters, sliders, in place editors, and cool effects.

But JS frameworks like Dojo, YUI, Prototype, Script.aculo.us Mootols, and Rico also help.