Ajax Framework

AJAX framework is a cross-browser framework that allows developers to develop dynamic web pages(that use AJAX) quickly.
Web pages developed using an AJAX framework can call web services and server pages through JavaScript without having to submit the current page. Recent Web-applications tend to use these for providing more interactivity and improving their overall functionality.

While there are hundreds of Ajax frameworks available, there currently only about 20 heavily used or heavily written about frameworks that fall into 3 categories. While all simplify the creation of Javascript-based dynamic based web applications, most are object-oriented packages that are written in Javascript itself. However, several others are written in the server side scripting language PHP, others are written in Java, and a few exist for ASP.net and ColdFusion.

Categories of AJAX frameworks

(X)HTML/CSS Supplement Frameworks

Classic examples of this type of framework are Prototype and JQuery. As is suggested by JQueries tagline "The Write Less, Do More Javascript Library", these frameworks attempt to add tools to a designers resource kit to simplify and standarize the javascript required to perform AJAX type actions.

Toward the goal of 'simplifying' these frameworks typically provide syntax that is reasonably cross-browser and future-proof. That is as new browsers are released and new vulnerabilities are discovered in older AJAX techniques, users of these frameworks should be able to simply update their framework library files with no or little modification to their original code.

Toward the goal of standardization, the adoption of these frameworks makes it relatively simple for an new programmer to walk into an existing project and make sense of the code.

The types of features included by these frameworks can loosely fall into 4 categories.

Pure AJAX Actions

These libraries generally include a call-back system that attempts to simplify the creation and execution of HTTPXMLRequest objects and to simply the handling of a returned XML, JSON or (X)HTML response.

Event Handling Systems

"Event Handling" These frameworks will also include code to assist in CSS and DOM manipulation, as well as adding some visual effects, page redrawing without page refreshes. The obvious advantage to these

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Server-End Technology Adapter Kits

Some of the most popular and interesting Ajax frameworks are:

Framework Name	Platform Type	What makes it interesting
ExtJS	Javascript	Small codebase, powerful, in use by many clients
Prototype/Script.aculo.us	Javascript	Completely free, high adoption among many large client, Prototype tends to handle data exchange while Script.aculo.us handle GUI effects. Allows uses of the smaller Prototype only codebase if you don't need fancy visual effect.