>>'m working on two AJAX projects at the moment and while the stuff works, and >is actually beneficial in many places for the user experience, it's tedious as >hell building these apps because of the lack of a decent JavaScript >development environment. And there's a lot of JavaScript client code.
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>Soon Im going to embark on another project in which some of the folks in my team want to use AJAX. It sounds cool but I share your opinion about javascript development. It's a ....pain. It there is one thing I hate in development, its javascript. Id rather build again smart clients than ajax...Anyways, hoping to make things easier, we are looking at a GUI tool provided by TIBCO ( we bought Tibco BusinessWorks ) that lets you easily build AJAX front end. Its called GI (generic interface). It has a built in ajax framework (there are several available out there...rico etc), controls and integrates well with web services. Its worth taking a look, although I dont know whether you can only buy this product from tibco.

Well the problem with these frameworks is that they usually are not designed to work well with specific Web backends like say ASP.NET. THey provide all the plumbing which is fine, but you're still left with a lot of coding for managing the UI, even if you're coding against their objects. You're still writing JavaScript code be it with some help.

I also find that these type of frameworks (including ATLAS from Microsoft) can be pretty complex and they are difficult to learn and work with because, well we're spoiled by powerful development tools that give us Intellisense and proper typing etc.

I've been taking a different approach in my apps with building AJAX functionality as add-on functionality only, never as primary functionality. There are simply too many issues such as breaking browser functionality.

It'll be interesting to see if all this attention on AJAX will result in a new and improved JavaScript version and hopefully better tools to work with this nasty code <g>...