Treetapper will be fairly Ajax-rich (though with more RESTful interfaces, too, and with concern for accessibility). I didn't know any Javascript (or PHP) when starting, so having a good debugger is handy. I first tried a "Javascript Debugger" plugin for Firefox, but it seemed a bit clunky. I've now installed
Firebug, and I am so far quite happy with it. It allows debugging/inspection of the Javascript, CSS, and HTML of the page.