It was only a matter of time before libraries emerged to make use of XMLHTTPRequest increasingly transparent to web developers. Jesse Garrett’s coining of the term ‘AJAX’ (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) seems to have quickly caught on, and last night Anil posted on ProNet about a PHP toolkit called SAJAX.

SAJAX is a nice first generation library. It allows the developer to register functions in their PHP and then produces javascript to allow the resulting page to make use of those functions. It’s lightweight (146 lines) and easy to use. The key thing that’s missing at the moment are a couple of wrappers that would allow it to integrate with templating systems — the only output functions print the javascript directly.

I’m wondering how long it’ll be before we start to see libraries that help build complete UIs based around the AJAX approach; building classes similar to those of DB_DataObject_FormBuilder and automatically enabling AJAX behaviours for the updates. That would certainly allow for rapid development of interesting applications.

UPDATE: I’m told that version 0.6 of SAJAX will offer some wrappers to return the javascript into variables. That version is due on Monday, and will also include a perl module.

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