Just a quick update. After the past days of planning QS Redux and searching for a name for the project I’ve settled on a few libraries to use as standard. I hunted low and high for AJAX libraries but the winner was Prototype. I actually like developing in Javascript so that quickly ruled out the PHP based libraries like xajax and Joshua Eichorn’s HTML_AJAX.

I think HTML_AJAX is one of the better PHP solutions and if you haven’t read Joshua’s book "Understanding AJAX" I can recommend it. Grabbed a copy a few days ago and it was good reading. But as I said, I leaned towards pure Javascript solutions early on.

So Prototype it is. To make Prototype even more attractive, some brave soul actually went and documented the entire library. Why this is not the official documentation hosted on the official website escapes me – it’s clean, clear, concise and in-depth. The other javascript libraries I looked at continue to have anywhere from zero to minimal documentation… The only missing thing is an AJAX request queue. I toured a mailing list or two and apparently few ever read Harry Fueck on the php blog over on Sitepoint – many queue requests were met with "Why would you want that?" type questions and a blank stare. Harry has been banging on about AJAX and network latency and the problems it causes for months now. It should be fairly simple to implement a FIFO queue so I’ll see where that leads…

Of course the Zend Framework is a definite building block. I’ve been watching the mailing list for a while now and a lot of improvements are coming on stream. 0.2 is due a release by month end, and the next version following that may be called 0.7 – since 0.3 does not justify the amount of work done since the 0.15 preview release. Might even see 0.2 renumbered to 0.5 going by some recent mailing list suggestions.