I've started the process of looking in real detail at what type of support for AJAX we should have in Beehive. These are my early thoughts:
1) We shouldn't develop our on client side framework, instead we should adopt one or more of the current open source frameworks. Ideally, we could make this choice optional and not directly tie the tag programming model to the AJAX framework directly. 2) Dojo, Prototype, SAJAX and script.aculo.us <http://script.aculo.us> seem to be the best choices of frameworks to start looking at. 3) We want to create a base programming model in the tags that requires no coding (JavaScript) by the developer for simple things 4) We want to support a bunch of base features such as Google Suggest/AutoComplete, Html content replacement (select box, anchors, etc), form field and text/span updates. 5) We need to setup a pull model to refresh pages and with strong integration with page flows. 6) Multiple events need to be delivered to the client from the server and multiple actions be called per XmlHttpRequest. 7) There are also other nice features such as Callout and Drag and Drop that are on the nice to have level. In addition, we need to continue to push our "rich controls" to become richer. This means that the Tree, DivPanel and DataGrid need to become much richer. Today both the Tree and DivPanel support XmlHttpRequest, but don't support dynamic update of their content. I've sent mail the the user list asking for input. I'm also looking for more technical/design feedback and discussion to take place here. What do people think?
