Although I primarily focus on Microsoft technologies, another area I keep somewhat up on is advances in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails arena.   Ruby on Rails is the technology that probably will replace most PHP web development on the Linux/Apache framework in the next couple of years.  If you have any *nix background or have a Linux build laying around somewhere, check out Ruby on Rails - it's got some pretty slick concepts going on.

Anyway, not to digress too much, I've been covering AJAX and Atlas in posts recently.  One AJAX implementation that is heavily used in the Ruby on Rails community is Prototype and Scriptaculous.   Prototype is a JavaScript object library that has a very straightforward AJAX implementation.  Ruby on Rails has integrated support of this.  Scriptaculous is another JavaScript library that is built on top of Prototype that has a few pretty cool effects such as drag and drop containers, autotext completion, and sortable client-side lists.  So Prototype / Scriptaculous is kind of the AJAX for Ruby on Rails.

Both of these javascript libraries can also be used in .NET applications, and if you are looking for a lightweight method to implement a little bit of AJAX into an existing web application, this is a viable option.   The steps are to include both the prototype and scriptaculous script libraries in your page, write a custom AJAX responder, and write a simple javascript call to implement it.  I'll cover examples of this in a later post.