Daniel Zeiss has put together the and excellent review of Ajax frameworks for ASP.NET. He narrowed down his selection of frameworks as follows
First, let me explain why only these 11 Frameworks are included although there is a lot more AJAX stuff for ASP.NET out there. All the frameworks listed here have one unique AJAX feature: They allow updating page content without programming AJAX directly – i call it indirect AJAX programming – a comparable concept is called Hijax. To make it concrete: Direct AJAX programming would mean dealing with client scripts, DHTML, method proxies, client side rendering and so on… Another important property the framework must have is the ability to support non-AJAX controls and enhance them with AJAX features. Therefore, frameworks that supply only controls with built in AJAX-features (Buttons, Trees, Grids, Lists and so on…) are not included in the comparison.
He has done extensive work in road testing and comparing. Well worth a look.
Review isn’t good because a lot of more powerful libraries have been left out. For example Ajaxium – component that enables AJAX for ASP.NET pages (with AJAX-ed navigation between different pages), supports _all_ browsers (old browsers are supported by automatic switching to ASP.NET mode), search engines, has built-in support for loading notifications, etc.
We’re using this library more than a year, but it was not included into the review. Why?
That is a good question!
Maybe you or the creators of Ajaxium should notify Daniel. I personally would like a more thorough review including tests on server cpu load and memory consumption.
It helps the framework builders do a better job and everybody else saves a lot of time investigating and testing…