I really enjoy keeping up with Ben Galbraith's Ajaxian web site. It’s a terrific resource for keeping up with the latest news from that world, and for getting introduced to many of the toolkits that are available. The site also offers plenty of stimulating discussion to follow and even regular feature-length interviews with the important players; all Podcasts of course.

Even if you don’t have the time to keep up with Ajaxian.com's frequent entries, you can quickly scan for widgets that interest you. A great deal of these widgets can easily be added to your application without much tweaking.

I've found that the large majority of attention coming from the so called "Web 2.0" focuses on eye candy. That fact makes it very easy to dismiss what’s been going on over the last year(ish).

As professional developers, we have a core responsibility to deliver the best application possible to our paying customers. This extends to maximizing the user experience. We can no longer afford to dismiss the UI layer as simply a means to an end. In particular, Government applications are no longer the "just let me get at the data" websites they used to be.

With that point in mind, Platinum Solutions was pleased to have Stuart Halloway deliver the Pragmatic AJAX course to our staff last month. There are a bunch of JavaScript frameworks out there, but we focused on Prototype and script.aculo.us, which compliment each other very nicely.

By coincidence, Daniel Silva shared something called Lightbox with me this week which as it happens, sits on top of those two products. Lightbox v2.0 was just released and it fits into the easy to implement category.

Lightbox is worth mentioning here because it does have a major Wow Factor, it is incredibly easy to integrate (<5 minutes to install, configure, and learn!), and most importantly, increases usability in your application manyfold. Once you've added the appropriate .css, .js, and images files, you need only link to them and add
      <a href="images/image-1.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="my caption">image #1</a>
to your page.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so now it's time to View a Running Example. Rather than being taken to a new page, or to a popup window, watch what happens when you click the photos.

You can do more with Lightbox 2. Check out the web page at http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/. And when you're done, look at http://www.ajaxian.com for more. In future posts, I'll highlight more of my favorites.