Work has kept me very busy as we approach our January 1st deadline. I can say at this point in time that I am getting quite familiar with AJAX and the frameworks surrounding it. I am definitely interested in learning more about the framework aspect of it since this seems to be the real sticking point. The asynchronous methodology lends itself to some very confusing and hard to debug aspects — especially when you start having a parent object manage several child object. In this scenario you have to have the parent wait for all of the children to finish before it can report success itself. This doesn’t seem all too horrendous until you start multiplying out the number of parents, the number of children, and then adding a few levels to things.

I think it would be very beneficial to read what others are doing in this area so I’m going to try and pickup some material on the subject when I can. There are apparently a few books out there.One of them appeared on Slashdot recently but I’m not overly thrilled with the description. And for the price, it’s not really worth it. Bookpool has it for $28 something, but I am not sure if it’s worth it.

Pragmatic Ajax, available from pragmaticprogrammer.com is $20 as a beta copy which I’m thinking would be worth purchasing.

I think for the time being I’m going to review the web information available from sites such as Ajax Patterns and Ajaxian. Some of the main information I’m looking for is AJAX Patterns and Frameworks, as well as Ajax testing. It looks like usual, the web has a lot to offer.