Learning AJAX

I’m trying to teach myself this new thing called AJAX which rose to fame together with Web 2.0. I’ve done AJAX programming – or coding – a couple of months back. It was more of investigating what it really was. Anyway, SAJAX by modernmethod was my first choice due to the hype it received early last year. My interest on it just waned after that.

Today, my curiousity was once again aroused. Almost daily AJAX powered web applications goes into Beta and launched for public testing. I might say, time for me to add another one to my skillset. Downloaded the popular toolkits for evaluation on which one makes me comfortable. What I have so far: AjaxTk from Zimbra, Dojo, Mochikit, and Openrico. There are more coming.

Preliminary investigation – from blogs and personal effort – reveals that Mochikit is by far easiest to get started with. Thanks to good documentation and simple demos. My first choice was to use Dojo but I couldn’t figure out how to get started with their widgets. They have lots of widgets. Next Zimbra’s Ajax Toolkit. Somebody claimed they have nicer widgets. It remains to be seen.