I’m currently building an application that sits on top of SAP XI (Netweaver Infrastructure) and SAP PS/CATS
for delivering project hours through a web application in an Intranet. The gateway to SAP XI are SOAP requests
(of course with PHP5).

During the nature of SOAP requests to SAP, a request may take 1 to 3 seconds (getting project and task lists,
updating project hours etc.)… too long for waiting for a page refresh, so we use fancy AJAX stuff here to deliver the best user experience that’s possible – just
replacing the parts of the page we really need to replace.

What do we need for achieving this user experience? Prototype, Scriptaculous (which sits on top of Prototype and provides some
eye-glooming effects etc.) and later (we currently use our own defined string format for transmitting the
data through the XMLHttpRequest) JSON to transport PHP arrays/objects transparently to the client
JavaScript which then delivers it to several <div>s or <span>s in the page. The results from the
XMLHttpRequest update the innerHTML property of the corresponding element that should be updated.

Why do we use Prototype and Scriptaculous? Because their APIs are KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. I hope
more and more people will keep on using it. Great work!