I've been working with Netbeans and Java for several years now - building Swing apps and more recently, web applications. I have not written much in Javascript, but I have some basic idea of how it works.

I have an application to build that needs some quick interactive responses and AJAX appears to be the right technology to use. My question is simple - which AJAX toolkit(s) are most effective these days, and are they available in the Netbeans environment. I know about DOJO, and I've seen some others. I'm not interested in starting a flame session or getting into a 'religious' war , but I would like to get a sense of what is both effective and popular so if possible, I won't pick a dead-end toolkit to work with...

thanks in advance,

nbc

For whatever it's worth, IBM is both one of the most successful commercial vendors in the world, and one of the strongest supporters of open source (IMHO).

And they use Dojo extensively.

For that reason alone, I don't think Dojo is in any danger of becoming obsolete/unsupported any time soon.

Besides - I think Dojo is an excellent toolkit.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articl...innovation.htm

@nbcohen, You can use plain javascript or many javascript frameworks such as Dojo(mentioned earlier), Prototypejs, JQuery, etc.

It's probably fair to say that JQuery is the most popular JavaScript library at this point, and it's a good technical choice. The API is very nice to work with, it's fully-featured, the browser coverage is through, and it is managed in a very professional way. If I had a problem with JQuery I would probably look again at Dojo and YUI, which are probably the best alternatives.

This video is good introduction to JQuery.