Jim Plush has a brief note over on his site with some talk about PHP and AJAX - and "punishing" your clients less.

From working in the PHP Enterprise world I know two things... big companies have ALOT of data and they want it displayed fast. If you can give them alot of data in a website, fast and correctly anything you do is golden. Here is a problem I tackled with Ajax technology...

Problem: You have a tree control in javascript that displays a series of clickable tree branches. The list is expanding as time goes on. So now you have 3,000 possible nodes in your tree and next week you might have 7,000, next year 10,000.

The solution? Don't make your customer pay for things they aren't going to look at! We have 7,000 nodes in our tree. Will the customer look at half of those in one sitting? probably not. So what is the solution? Ajax + PHP.

He recommends this booming web technology to create a dynamic menu showing only the data that the customer requests, generating the rest via a few handy javascript calls.

I like to call it Data-On-Demand for the enterprise environment. If you're dealing with huge amounts of data, don't make the customer pay for things they may not look at. I didn't use a fancy Ajax package, just the base functionality and some PHP+JS DOM knowledge.