Just a short note, i found this today – Google Web Toolkit. It looks very promising and I’m just about to start experimenting with it (can’t wait!). It’s a framework for creating AJAX applications with the usual gmail look, but the fresh approach is that you write the application in Java – and then you compile to to Javascript/HTML when you’re ready to ship. I’m don’t how well this development model works with dynamic data etc.

When implementing script.aculo.us’ AJAX In Place Editor for a project I’m currently working on, I ran into some character encoding problems. My PHP framework uses ISO-8859-1, while the ajax script was submitting UTF-8 to my server. Reading the wiki documentation, I discovered that this was a ‘known feature’: The form data is sent encoded in UTF-8 regardless of the page encoding. I was recommended to use iconv to convert back to ISO-8859-1 on the server.