Have you ever wondered to design your website like desktop applications? Fortunately, with AJAX we can achieve this. By using AJAX, we no need to refresh the whole page when we just want to update a portion of a website such as the weather information or news panel. This makes our web apps look like desktop applications and bring good user experience to our visitors.

You can create an XMLHttpRequest object every time when you want to initialize an AJAX call, unfortunately you may need repeat every step every time, this is time consuming and brings maintenance overhead. Do you know what kind of AJAX frameworks you can choose to simplify your AJAX development? Naresh Kumar summarized 11 commonly used AJAX frameworks for us. They include jQuery, Dojo,YUI etc.

Here is a small description of some of these frameworks

jQuery:  The jQuery library is providing many easy to use functions and methods to make rich applications. These functions are very easy to learn and even a designer can learn it fast. Due to these features jQuery is very popular and in high demand among the developers. You can use jQuery in all the web based applications irrespective of the technology.

Dojo Tookit: Dojo Toolkit is an open source modular JavaScript library (or more specifically JavaScript toolkit) designed to ease the rapid development of cross-platform, JavaScript/Ajax-based applications and web sites.

YUI (Yahoo User Interface) Library: It is a set of utilities and controls, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and Ajax BSD.

To know other AJAX frameworks he mentioned and the description of them. Please visit the 11 Commonly used AJAX Frameworks.

There are some other widely used AJAX frameworks such as Ext JS and Prevel Framework, Anyway, by choosing the one you like, it will largely save your development time and achieve the effect you expect.