Our software is an installable web application for web hosting systems management...so we have a lot of opportunities to do neat stuff--there are so many useful UI elements that could be added that would make the product more useful without requiring any additional information than what we already collect or create. We're currently building a "desktop" with ExtJS that'll have a dozen or so widgets for presenting various bits of information about the running system. The data already exists and is currently, mostly, presented in simple HTML and CSS graphs...but with a little tweaking we can make the backend spit out simple data structures in JSON and then display them in various dynamic ways.
The first one that is almost wholly free of server-side code is a "news" module that pulls a feed from our forums News category on our company website. ExtJS makes this kind of thing trivial (one of their example apps is an RSS feed reader that uses Google Gears). Other short-term bits will be converting all of our graphs to dynamic versions that change every minute or so. Bigger plans include a terminal emulator to replace the Java applet SSH client we currently include. Interactive terminals are trickier, and I'm not sure if we'll end up implementing the actual full terminal emulator in JavaScript or do most of the work server-side and just pass things down to the server (probably the latter at first). But, very short-term (like being released sometime this week) it's all just conversions of existing widgets to present nothing but JSON--it actually makes the server-side code remarkably simpler to not have any UI elements.
The first one that is almost wholly free of server-side code is a "news" module that pulls a feed from our forums News category on our company website. ExtJS makes this kind of thing trivial (one of their example apps is an RSS feed reader that uses Google Gears). Other short-term bits will be converting all of our graphs to dynamic versions that change every minute or so. Bigger plans include a terminal emulator to replace the Java applet SSH client we currently include. Interactive terminals are trickier, and I'm not sure if we'll end up implementing the actual full terminal emulator in JavaScript or do most of the work server-side and just pass things down to the server (probably the latter at first). But, very short-term (like being released sometime this week) it's all just conversions of existing widgets to present nothing but JSON--it actually makes the server-side code remarkably simpler to not have any UI elements.