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 ? and fast to make, im not the fastest php developer and ajax is new but I understand the principles. I think basecamp.org is made with ruby and it has very slick ajax stuff in it.

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

[neylitalo]

I don't think there are any WYSIWYG editors for AJAX, but I can vouch for the [url=http://www.openrico.org]Rico library[/url]. It'll considerably improve development time, and will give you some very functional AJAX and DHTML widgets.

[ShogunWarrior]

I'd recommend having a look at Sajax : modernmethod.com/sajax/ which is easy enough to snap in to a project.