There is an application that I co-wrote which contains a function that would benefit greatly if I rewrote it using AJAX. So I have made the decision to go ahead and rewrite it. My hope is that the users will be overjoyed with the wiz-bang new look and feel.

So now the decision is made and I start with pen and paper and map out what I'm going to do in a very basic fashion. With that done I read about how the cool kids are building AJAX applications these days. With this search I find that AJAX Patterns seems to be the center of the AJAX universe. Digging a little deeper I find that instead of rolling my own framework I should use an existing one. Inside is an index of potential frameworks and I'm overjoyed.

Then that reality hits me. There are sssooo many frameworks out there that attack the problem of delivering AJAX functionality that it is hard to make a decision. I had no idea that so many until I sat down and tried to decide which to use. Since most of these frameworks have appeared within the last year there is no clear leader in the bunch.

Anyway one thing has led to another and I've decided to use DWR. I am not sure if I will stick with it but it sounds easy enough and it does not look as though much javascript programming is needed to make it happen and I'm all about minimal JavaScript programming. Calling Java application server with RPC like calls sounds simple enough. IBM developerWorks even has a nice tutorial that lays things out for me. Here I go on my first AJAX development project that a business will actually use.