Haven't heard of Local by Flywheel? It's a web development tool for managing server environments that was designed to be used with Wordpress, but can easily be used for Craft, ExpressionEngine, Processwire or any Content Management System (CMS).
Recently I was asked by a client to do some customisation of a Wordpress site to enable a site visitor to load posts from a certain category into the same part of the page via AJAX. This could have been done in a couple of different ways – using AJAX as requested; or all the posts could've been printed to the page, with javascript then used to hide all but one and also used to navigate between them in some sort of hide/show, fading/sliding effect. I've done similar things like this before using jQuery, but there were two reasons why I didn't go that route on this occasion: