[biggerUniverse]

Has anyone used it, and is it actually any more useful than PHP or Servlet+JSP?
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[Mandrake]

I've used it. It's just a different technology. It's usefull for things like real-time searches or dynamic forms. It's a way of extending PHP/ASP/Etc, not a replacement for them.
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[LeoDraco]

I have not messed around with the XMLHttpRequest side of things, as of yet, but I have been doing the other two (notable) features of AJAX for a while: as a brief search of the forums would suggest, I have been championing (proper) HTML/CSS for quite some time; I have also been utilizing the DOM bindings in JS for about a year now, with different projects. The latter, as Mandrake suggests, are very nice for dynamic form construction.

While I can see a few areas where using something like SOAP might be useful, I have no immediate use for it. I'm working on a rewrite of my website, and could probably tack some of the functionality on there, but I would have to redesign whole segments of it to minimize the data transfers.
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[Nephilim]

Yeah, what Mandrake said. You'll still probably need PHP or Java (or whatever) on the server side to get AJAX to work. My understanding is that AJAX is more of a paradigm for how information goes back and forth. Instead of loading up separate pages of a web application every time a user wants to do something, instead, you send the whole application once, and then send XML back and forth. But you still need something to process requests and send back XML on the server side.
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