Think you know you technologies ? read on.

[mojito]

I have a good discussion here and a very good question to ask.

What is there in the way of technologies or tool kits that can enable me to develop front end (dhtml and ajax etc) rapidly with backend support. My prefered environment is LAMP, but just would like to know what is available.

Im looking at the following possibilites

RUBY -http://www.rubyonrails.org/

only have the one now ! maybe this isnt up to the job ?

What we really should be doing is for example the following

say I need a dropdown which populates another dropdown, I would like to just drag that dropdown to my page and have the ajax functionality somehow attached, similarly I would like wysiwyg editors come along with the text fields. This makes my application very much web 2 no ?

I have gone to lengths to make my backend (via html forms) very user friendly but ajax is surely the way so we dont have page refresh. But it really pushes up the development time no ?
Is there a technology you know about I should be looking at ?

thanks for insightful replies

:)

[NogDog]

...ajax is surely the way...
AJAX is fine -- as long as you add <noscript> content (and the relevant backend processing for it) to handle those users who do not have JavaScript available and enabled. Personally, I hate coding two different branches of processing if I don't have to (and my clients normally want me to charge them for as little time as possible) and I try to use best current practices for the HTML content I create which helps minimize page transfer times, so I've shied away from AJAX so far.

[Stephen Philbin]

ajax is surely the way so we dont have page refresh.

When I first started out with web development, I used to look for ways of building pages and sites that avoided refreshing the page too. Yet now, I really don't see the point. In fact I think it rather strange that people seem to think it necessary to do so. To the end user, either way yields a pretty much identical experience anyway.

I think it's important we don't get carried away with all the latest buzzwords and methodologies and forget the fundamentals. It's nice to give a few people something different and interesting, but it's better to give everyone something useful.

With regards to development time, though. I'd say it takes about the same amount of time for me.

[mojito]

Thanks for the replies, I wasnt asking if you think that ajax is worth using, I was asking if there is an environment which sppeds up my backend, admin pages etc, so for example instead of always reproducing code I can just call a method within the toolkit for example to make my posted variable database friendly or encoded, or has a few templates for doing user authentication etc, those things take a long while to develop etc. I am not sure but think this is what ruby is for ?