AJAX Scripts? AJAX Tools? Huh? If you’re a webmaster like me, then you’ve probably heard of Ajax. But if you’re not a geek like me, then you may not know what it is. Well, we’re not talking about the cleaning product. Rather, we’re talking about Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. The following is a list of top AJAX Tools.

The first 19 are some of my favorites, mostly meant for developers. The rest are awesome, too!

So check’em out!

My favorites

Aptana- The world’s first AJAX server. Use the same ubiquitous set of languages you find in the Web browser, on the server to build full apps or presentation tiers faster and more easily.

AJAX Form Pro – This is simply the best tool on the market for professional, interactive & secure web forms.

Tigermouse- Tigermouse is a modern web applications framework for PHP. It relies on AJAX technology, so in pair with being lightweight enables you to build dynamic, responsive and interactive web applications. It is well suited for enterprise-grade tasks because of its strong commitment to server-side business logic processing. Tigermouse does not require any Javascript coding, so you can focus on your application core logic instead of tinkering in UI.

Clean Ajax- Clean is an open source engine for AJAX, that provides a high level interface to work with the AJAX technology. It can be plugged in any page or DHTML framework because it was designed in conformation with the separation of concerns principle, keeping focus on AJAX issues.

Sajax- Sajax is a tool to make programming websites using the Ajax framework — also known as XMLHTTPRequest or remote scripting — as easy as possible. Sajax makes it easy to call ASP, Cold Fusion, Io, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python or Ruby functions from your webpages via JavaScript without performing a browser refresh. The toolkit does 99% of the work for you so you have no excuse to not use it.

Scriptaculous- script.aculo.us provides you with easy-to-use, cross-browser user interface JavaScript libraries to make your web sites and web applications fly. What’s inside? animation framework, drag and drop, Ajax controls DOM utilities, and unit testing.

Ajax Loading GIF generator- Another Ajax gif generator, you can never have enough!

Google Ajax Language API- With the AJAX Language API, you can translate and detect the language of blocks of text within a webpage using only Javascript. In addition, you can enable transliteration on any textfield or textarea in your web page. For example, if you were transliterating to Hindi, this API will allow users to phonetically spell out Hindi words using English and have them appear in the Hindi script.

Potix- Solutions for your Ajax problems. ZK is the leading open source Ajax + Mobile framework. With 900,000 downloads, ZK empowers a variety of companies and institutions, ranging from small to large, including Barclays, Sun Micro, Swiss RE, Alcatel-Lucent, and many others.

Prototype JS- Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.

Google Web Toolkit- Writing web apps today is a tedious and error-prone process. Developers can spend 90% of their time working around browser quirks. In addition, building, reusing, and maintaining large JavaScript code bases and AJAX components can be difficult and fragile. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) eases this burden by allowing developers to quickly build and maintain complex yet highly performant JavaScript front-end applications in the Java programming language.

Dojo- The Dojo Toolkit is an open-source JavaScript toolkit for building great web applications. It shortens the time between idea and implementation by providing a well conceived API and set of tools for assisting and fixing the issues experienced in everyday web development. It is lightning fast, extremely robust, and supplies a solid set of tools for DOM manipulation, Animations, Ajax, Event and keyboard normalization, Internationalization (i18n) and Accessibility (a11y).

ASP.net Ajax- ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating efficient and interactive Web applications that work across all popular browsers.

Thinwire- Open source Ajax RIA framework. Rich Web Applications, Made Simple! That is the motto of ThinWire. ThinWire is a community driven LGPL open source development framework that allows you to easily build applications for the web that have responsive, expressive & interactive user interfaces. Use ThinWire to handle the view-layer of your Java EE (J2EE) application and you’ll be able to provide an unparalleled user experience, while at the same time completing your project faster than ever.

Rico- Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request.

Mini Ajax- A showroom of nice looking simple downloadable DHTML and AJAX scripts.

Ajax for Noobs- Take a look on the net and you’ll see endless pages of AJAX Frameworks: libraries which promise to do all the trivial and dirty AJAX work for you, leaving you free to code without actually understanding how the application you’re writing really works. So lets pull back the smoke and mirrors and see what AJAX is and why it’s just a simple evolution of client/server tricks Javascript programmers have been doing since the web was born.

Yahoo User Interface Library- The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses.

Ajax load- Ever try creating your own loading image with ajax? Sometimes it can be frustrating. Let Ajax load do it for you!

Ajax Forms

Ajax contact form- This is an Ajax
contact form form for PHP enabled web servers.

Lightform- LightForm is a free Ajax/PHP contact form. It combines FormCheck2 for fields validation and NiceForms to style text fields and textareas.

Php/Ajax contact form- Very simple contact form script.

Dustin’s Ajax contact form- An unobtrusive AJAX contact form (works even with JavaScript disabled).

Ajax newsletter form- Learn how to use Ajax to collect email addresses for your newsletter.

Showcases

Sexy Box- This will create a basic “lightbox” or “thickbox” interface using AJAX Requests and HTML masking.

Lightview- Lightview was built to change the way you overlay content on a website.

Graybox- GreyBox can be used to display websites, images and other content in a beautiful way.

Minishowcase- Minishowcase is a small and simple php/javascript online photo gallery, powered by AJAX that allows you to easily show your images online, without complex databases or coding, allowing to have an up-and-running gallery in a few minutes.

Lightbox JS- Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

Ajax Calendars

Zapatec events calendar- All operations are done via AJAX without refreshing the page. Events are created by dragging the cursor and are easily moved using drag and drop.

Bmgadg- Free Ajax calendar, requires PHP and Mysql.

Vista like Ajax calendar- The Vista-like Ajax Calendar (vlaCalendar) version 2 is a unobtrusive web version of the slick and profound Windows Vista taskbar calendar, by using the MooTools javascript framework, AJAX, XHTML, CSS and PHP.

Ajax navigation, tabs, menus

Ajax tabs content script- This is a versatile Ajax Tabs Content script that lets you display content pulled from external files inside a DIV and organized via CSS tabs.

Ajax for WordPress- AJAXed WordPress (AWP) is a WordPress plugin that adds the power, usability and beauty of AJAX to any blog or WordPress based website. Its features improve the user experience, the administration capabilities and the design potential of any WordPress based blog.

Closeable Tab Module- Quite simple tab module for your Ajax application.

Ajax Navigation- Use this script instead of frames. When a visitor clicks on a specific link, the content of that link is inserted into the page without a refresh. When a page doesn’t exist, a user-friendly error message is given.

Mootabs- MooTabs is a tiny(3kb) class for MooTools. As the name suggests, it’s main purpose is to help out with the creation of simple tab navigation.

Uploaders

File Chucker- Multi-User File Manager & Uploader with Progress Bar.

AJAX Uploader for ASP.NET- Asynchronous upload allows the user to work on other part of the page while the uploading is in progress. For example, the user can start uploading attachments and then start to enter email text while the attachments are being uploaded.

Max’s Ajax file uploader- This is a simple script which uses JavaScript and PHP to upload files to your webserver.

jQuery Ajax uploader plugin- An amazing uploader created by Steve Sanderson.

Useful Ajax Solutions

Ajax IM- Ajax im (“asynchronous javascript and xml instant messenger”) is a browser-based instant messaging client. It uses AJAX to create a near real-time IM environment that can be used in conjunction with community, intranet, and social websites. No refreshing of the page is ever needed for this “web application” to work, as everything is updated in real-time via JavaScript.

jQuery Scroll- This plugin allows you to easily animate any series of elements, by sequentially scrolling them.

Ajax Directory Manager- An incredibly simple to use Ajax directory manager. You can easily drag and drop items and manage users with ease.

Starbox- Starbox allows you to easily create all kinds of rating boxes using just one PNG image.

Drop Shadow- Don’t have an image editor and want to create a shadow in an image? This is the solution for you.

Page Peel- Easily add non intrusive ads in your website.

Image Protector- Tired of seeing your images splashed around on the net? Not anymore. With this simple tool prevent your images from being stolen.

Moo sound- Adds sound to your website, you choose the song.

Moo socialize- Do you have awesome articles like me? Then you’ll want a way to let the world know about them. With Moo socialize your readers can submit your articles to popular social bookmarking sites.

Ajax Chat- I’ve seen hundreds of websites asking you to pay for a chat script for your website. Why pay when you have a cool script like this?

The Ultimate Password strength Meter- Prevent your password from being guessed. With the ultimate password strength meter you can create completely unique passwords that will prevent you from being hacked.