Ajax in .NET (Gaia) - High performance

I have recently worked in a project where we tried out different ajax technologies for .NET in a high performance web site.

The challange is when you want to use postback to post data with ajax in yoyr page. If you don't need the postback functionality, you should probably just go for Jquery og Prototype. If you need the postback on your page you have to select a framework to do the job for you.

1) You could use Jquery og Prototype for this functionality as well, but you will end up coding a lot of javascript by hand and you have to build webservices to recieve the data.

2) You could use the .NET Ajax framework. This will do the job for you, but a big drawback is that the framwork generates a lot of javascript-references (who is not cached by default). This is slow and I would not recommend it.

3) You could use (and in my opinion should use) a library called Gaia. Basicly this library has the same functionality as .NET Ajax, but in the last release you will have the ability to generate the javascript before you deploy the application, and put it on any webserver you want. The reference to the file will go in the end of the body (where you should put all your javascript refereneces).

Thanx to the Gaia-team and the performence-issues we found in our project, our application could handle over 1200 req/sec during a stresstest, as opposed to 70-80 with the .NET ajax! On the same server, and the same code in the application...

If you need postback and end up using Gaia, I would recommend not using JQuery or Prototype by hand. Do all your Ajax-work with Gaia instead.

So my tip - check out Gaia!! http://ajaxwidgets.com/