There has been a lot of buzz about this "AJAX" technology among web designer types. AJAX is a relatively new method of live communication between a web browser and a web server. AJAX is implemented with a client side scripting language, and a server side scripting language.

In my implementations of AJAX, I use JavaScript and PHP. So far I've only created a few trivial examples, but I hope to soon create something a bit more substantial.

My current AJAX projects are:

The chat room on this site. Messages are sent and retrieved as needed, avoiding wasteful page refreshes.

The counter that displays how long you have been viewing this site is another simple AJAX trick. It is a JavaScript that reports timings to the server, which tracks timing values across several pages.

If you click on this site a few times, you may notice that there are lines being drawn in the background. A script is transmitting your clicks to the server, and when you load a new page, all of your clicks are drawn into the background image using PHP and GD. It is not meant as a serious tool, at least not until I have added an inferface to control the drawing methods.

I have only created a few trivial examples of what AJAX can do, but I see great things on the horizon, for my own website and the web in general.

Check out http://maps.google.com for a really cool example of how intelligent browser/server communication can make a common task more intuitive.

I just added an AJAX blog browser to SproutSearch. All the functionality isn't there yet, but its a neat way to browse blogs.

http://www.sproutsearch.com/blogbrowser.php

I just found this site called theBroth, where you can drag colored tiles around the page, and collabote with other people online. Please visit my sproutworks room and help make a picture.

http://www.thebroth.com/sproutworks

TheBroth runs with PHP/MySQL, and AJAX for the interactive parts.

I've just uploaded a new program I'm working on. It's an icon editor that uses AJAX to provite a multi-user editing experience. At this early stage in the program, many features are missing, but there is some basic functionality.

You can select a color, then click on the grid. Your click will be stored on the server, where other people who view the page will see your work. When you change a pixel, you will see any changes other people have made to the icon. I will be adding some more real-time features and drawing tools in the near future. In the meantime, you can try to make simple pictures with the program.

http://www.sproutworks.com/pixeleditor.php

When I visit programming talk I find out a hot topic talking about Levyo Ajax Technology Gallery. Their site is at http://levyo.com demo at http://gettingzone.com .They build Ajax application on PHP, Mysql. Their gallery runs so fast, especially when I login, register, submit, rate, write comment, upload, process, Tab feature... It's great.

How can they do especially "unlimited tab feature", you can add new category in Admin CP, it generates new Tab automatically?

Well ... well Levyo Ajax Gallery has support IE 6.x & 7.x, Firefox 2.x, Netscape 8.x, not only just Microsoft products (IE). Cool.. yup ... but the price is still rather "hight". Hix ... guys, do you know another Gallery built on Ajax like them. I see some but not cool if compare with them. 100% actions of their gallery are built on ajax

I have been writing simple AJAX applications for a while now. Up to now I have stuck with procedural JavaScript that fetchs raw HTML and inserts it in the page. I knew these methods were lacking, but I used them for quite a while anyway.

I started reading about how to write object oriented JavaScript. I don't what took me so long to look into it. I've been using OO in C++ for about 10 years, and PHP for 3 years. I'm a big fan of objects. So tonight, I decided to write an Ajax object as part of a bigger scheme to buld myself a useful library for doing net stuff. I ran into some problems using a callback function for the xmlhttp response, but I figured it out.

Next I started reading about parsing XML and JSON. I decided to try JSON since it sounded easier. I made a PHP class that converts an array of derived classes into a JSON object. I made a simple callback to parse the object on the client side, and write some boxes full of fake data into the page.

Now everything is in place to use in a real application. I think I'll start with making an AJAX file/directory browser for a PHP project management system I'm developing. Then there are plenty of things I want to ajaxify.