Me and Kariem just tossed together a new release of Ra-Ajax that can be downloaded at the
Ra-Ajax Google Code download page. The most important feature is probably our brand new
Ajax TreeView control.
Some of the features in the TreeView Control is the possibility of having TreeViewItems rendered both dynamically and statically. Statically rendered items will be rendered directly into the HTML markup of the page when the initial loading of the page occurs, while dynamic items will only be retrieved when the TreeViewNode is expanded the first time.
This makes the TreeView very lightweight in addition to giving you the flexibility to have extremely large TreeView nodes rendered on a demand basis. Also since the "static" items are rendered directly into the markup you can also use it as a "link menu" for your pages since any links you have inside of your static items will be rendered directly into the markup and will be visible for spiders and search engines.
To give an example of such a "no-compromises" you can use YSlow and FireBug on our
Ajax TreeView sample and see that the YSlow score is in fact more than 80, and the total amount of JavaScript on that page (which includes the TreeView, TabControl in Show Code and the Accordion) is less than 25KB. This is even before GZipping...
In addition there's not one line of JavaScript explicitly written for the TreeView so the entire size of the JS on your pages will still be roughly 15-20 kilobytes in total. (after minification)
We are trying really hard to make sure that Ra-Ajax is both a "RIA Framework" in addition to also being very useful for "Front End websites" with extreme demands on load-times, responsiveness, size and such...
In addition to the TreeView we've also fixed a substantial amount of bugs, and further stabilized the API of Ra-Ajax. Though still until the 1.0 version we cannot make any guarantees about that the API will be completely un-changed. To give an example we're almost 100% sure of that we'll change the DOM/HTML rendering of the TreeView, so if you create your own skins for it you will probably be forced into changing it when we come out with our next release.