I’m considering using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology for some web applications that are under development. On my last Rich Internet Application I used the OpenLaszlo platform. It worked out very well and my only complaint is that dynamic view creation is quite slow. I think this is because OpenLaszlo uses the Macromedia Flash plugin for its display layer.
An alternative to this is to use the built-in capabilities of most modern browsers to render things nicely with CSS and do partial updates of the current page without reloading the entire page. This capability is what AJAX technology takes advantage of. And an interesting platform for implementing AJAX is Ruby on Rails.
More to come…