The "Rich Client Platform" buzz
word is such a broad area it's hard to say.. If you're talking about doing something on the UI using Ajax, then you might want to look at creating an Ajax specific set of template files. Using the template files, you can easily trim or change the information format. E.g., it can be modified to return just HTML "snippets" or JASON or XML.
This could be used by AJAX (or whatever) to present the info in whatever form you want.
You will have to figure out how you want to manage the user id connections, state, and the like.
Also, depending on your timeframe, you might want to look at jForum3 and maybe get involved with defining the REST API for that.
[originally posted on jforum.net by monroe]