Talking of pretty damned good RailsConf presentations, the one I’m most glad that I attended is Dan Webb’s unobtrusive Ajax. Dan’s approach feels so right: make it work the simple way first, then unobtrusively add Ajax later.

The key difference between Dan’s approach and the standard Rails form_remote_for, is that Dan’s approach does not break the non-ajax method. Apart from the obvious accessibility advantages, it is a much more incremental way of coding your application; you don’t need to break it to add the Ajax, so the tests for the non-ajax code will still pass.

Dan’s presentation is available here; his example applicaton is here; his UJS plugin his here.