Sajax has a current official release of version 0.10 with an unofficial version 0.11 available here, however, at the moment, there have been no updates since around April 2005. Sajax is extremely powerful not only because it was written to operate very simply, but because it is available for a wide variety of languages.

If you aren't aware of what all this is about, I'll give you a brief overview. Ajax is supposed to represent the term "Asynchronous Javascript And XML" (but isn't supposed to be an acronym, hence the lack of all caps). It is a fairly new technology that has been available in most browsers for the past couple of years, but surely you can google if you'd like a complete history. The very interesting thing about Ajax is that it allows you to update only select portions of a web page's content without requiring the browser to reload the entire page. If you have used the standard version of Gmail, you'll realize how it works; that is a great example of Ajax hard at work. Essentially, when a Javascript event happens, an object is created that makes a connection to the web server behind the scenes and requests some action to be performed. The object can then process the results and update select elements in the document as desired.

Enter Sajax. The authors took all of the guess work and complexities of Ajax and combined them into a very simple interface. There are still a lot of shortcomings but with lots of independents tossing in their two cents, it's getting better all the time. For example, if a user has ActiveX disabled in his Microsoft browser, it will not support Ajax, but a dude named kae added the ability for Sajax to emulate the ActiveX object using an iframe. I have made a few small changes myself for added flexibility and validation. The biggest changes are that I encapsulated Sajax in a class (for both PHP5 and earlier versions) and extended it to simply set a document element to the result of a remote script call.

I wrote a simple example that acts like a little slideshow. Check it out and tell me what you think at