Today's Paper: Chikenfoot - Ajax-based Webapp programming system by Michael Zolin, et al.

An excellent paper (in fact, a best-paper-awarded paper) describing technologies (a Web application development tool) with Ajax-like techniques.

Michael Bolin, Matthew Webber, Philip Rha, Tom Wilson, Robert Miller, Automation and Customization of Rendered Web Pages, In Proc. of UIST 2005, Seattle, WA, USA, Oct 23-26, 2005.

A pdf file available from:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/chickenfoot/uist05.pdf

Title:
Automation and Customization of Rendered Web Pages
Abstract:
On the desktop, an application can expect to control its user
interface down to the last pixel, but on the World Wide
Web, a content provider has no control over how the client
will view the page, once delivered to the browser. This creates
an opportunity for end-users who want to automate and
customize their web experiences, but the growing complexity
of web pages and standards prevents most users from
realizing this opportunity. We describe Chickenfoot, a programming
system embedded in the Firefox web browser,
which enables end-users to automate, customize, and integrate
web applications without examining their source code.
One way Chickenfoot addresses this goal is a novel technique
for identifying page components by keyword pattern
matching. We motivate this technique by studying how
users name web page components, and present a heuristic
keyword matching algorithm that identifies the desired
component from the user’s name.