Cool Technologies

I have been playing with Dreamweaver CS3 recently, and have completed a couple of training courses on Lynda.com on AJAX and SPRY

My test sites are at

http://ajax-test.rockbox-themes.org/ and

http://spry-test.rockbox-themes.org/

The Ajax one is quite simple to look at, but was a real pain in the but to build - lots of Javascript and PHP code, all to get a page that does exactly the same of the pure HTML version it replaced!
The actual difference is that the AJAX layer makes the web page work more like an application.  When you search on a traditional site, the query is passed in the URL and the results displayed on a separate 'results.html' type page.  With AJAX, the results are posted back to the same page as the query was performed on, making multiple searches much easier.

SPRY is adobes AJAX implementation framework, it is far easier to use than hand coding everything, but at the expense of some flexibility.

One thing I was quite pleased with is the tabbed panels example:

http://spry-test.rockbox-themes.org/Tabbed_Panels.php

But what is particularly interesting on that page is the two RSS feed tabs.  They were built using yet another cool technology: XLST...  You create an XLS file, which is linked to an XML based file.  This XLS is then merged with the HTML file on the server side.  This allows you to embed XML data into your own page.