Very interesting link Nick. I have been experimenting with Javascript based Ajax on the top header,ad_form and portlets. It would be interesting to create an intuitive way for developers. For example having a switch in listbuilder or ad_form to use Ajax.
I was exploring Rails way of approaching it. The Xmlhttp requests are directly mapped to methods in the controller, So the developer has to only think about which component of his view maps to a method. The rest the framework takes care.
One of the way we do this in openacs is by providing a way for xmlhttp requests to be directed to a single URL in a package ( or even to a single url on the site ):
For example:
In the Notes package we can have a script www/view.adp or tcl. Then we define all the "adp lets" in the lib directory and call the appropriate adp piece. The XMLHTTP requests would have a single url and a query variable called method which the "view" page serves.
