To the consternation of these same developers, the landscape changed and Web 2.0 hit the mainstream. Almost overnight, every website on the internet wanted to use or was using AJAX. Marketers joined the bandwaggon and every feature requested had to involve something dynamic and revolutionary. Thus JavaScript development quickly hit the forefront of peoples minds and became as important as any server-side technology available at the time.

Over the next few blog posts, I will be using the popular frameworks jQuery, Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), ExtJS and Adobe’s Spry with ColdFusion to demonstrate various techniques, such as autocomplete and form validation.

In the words of Yahoo:

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources.

Interestingly ColdFusion 8 also supports Spry, which could be considered a rather anaemic AJAX library compared to the YUI library. Whether Spry progresses out of prerelease remains to be seen, however, which ever AJAX route is taken, ColdFusion will benefit from closer integration in its core tag set.