Scriptaculous is one of the better-known Javascript/AJAX libraries, with useful built-in objects for adding Web 2.0 functionality to your pages. I’ve tinkered with it but hadn’t found a real-life application for it until I needed to allow a client to reorder a grid of thumbnail photos by dragging and dropping them. Added complication: she uses Safari.
Oh how I hate coding Javascript! I got something kind-of working, including an Ajax callback to update the database, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. So I put it aside for a while and looked at it again when I had some spare time. This time I came across Greg Neustaetter’s PHP wrapper class for Scriptaculous lists. Aha, the power of Scriptaculous without the pain of Javascript! With the aid of his well-documented examples it only took me about half an hour to create a proof-of-concept. So Web 2.0 here I come …