Ajax Phone Directory Portlet
Of all the portals I have done, the most common (and frequently the most used) application is the employee phone directory. In every implementation, it has worked the same where users type in the first few letters of an employees last name - click submit - and get results. This process involves refreshing the portal page wrapper, and even if you are using portlet caching, you still use server resources.
All the hub-bub about AJAX lately got me thinking about using Javascript and XML to respond to phone directory queries without refreshing the entire page wrapper.
Hence, a little project I did that presents the user with a pop-up DHTML layer with the responses from their phone directory query.
Although it is packaged in a Lotus DOmino database, the HTML and Javascript that constitutes the guts of the process can be used anywhere. I am still getting my other site up and running where I will host the portlet using PHP/MySQL, but in the meantime, if you ask nicely I will send you all the details you need.