Joshua Eichorn has posted more information about his AJAX_HTML extension (that just got accepted into PEAR, btw), and provides a kind of "Hello World" example with it.

This is a continuation of my AJAX Hello World series, in my earlier posts I covered sajax and JPSpan. In this article i’ll cover how to get a basic AJAX appliction up and running with HTML_AJAX. The application in question is the same simple app as the other examples, it has an input box for adding random strings and an button to add a random one to a div.

When your using HTML_AJAX you have more choices then with either JPSpan or sajax. But to keeps things simple were going to use a setup similar to how we used JPSpan, an external server page that generates a JavaScript proxy which is included by our html page that does the actual action.

Once it's installed (a simple matter if you have PEAR), he dives right in, showing you how to create the server component and following it up with the code for the client side. Then, toss in a little HTML for an interface and - voila - you have a simple, quick-to-develop Ajax application that will show a random value in a div.

I can't tell you how much I love the fact that it takes about 20, maybe 30 lines of code to make this all work. I've been developing a few scripts with Ajax behind them, and seeing something this simple really gives me hope...