Scripting has now been available in browsers for over a decade. The recent AJAX craze -- an older, more mature sibling of Microsoft's DHTML -- has spurned the development of countless AJAX and DOM platform libraries, each with their own niche.
Even though Rails is really partial to Prototype and
Script.alculo.us, I decided to spent some time playing with some
of the competitors. I like the simplicity of moo.fx, but my
personal favorite at the moment is Yahoo User Interface library
(YUI). It's BSD-licensed, documented out the wazoo,
and it's being actively developed and supported by Yahoo. Toss in
Jack Slocum's yui-ext, and you have an awesome dynamic grid
widget, layout manager, asynchronous animation primitives, and a great
JavaScript-only dialog widget that'll impress anyone (check out the
slick per-block commenting in the Django Book, for a
rough idea of what you can do with yui-ext). Not too shabby. With a
little effort, even Rails can be beaten into YUI
submission).
(By the way, I am not and will never be a fan of AJAX for the sake of AJAX and at the expense of usability. But I do think a little bit, used sparingly, can really spice up a page).
Anyway, expect to see a bit of YUI pizazz around here whenever I finally get the long, long overdue backend rewrite rolling.