According to Vince Bonfanti, the developers of BlueDragon have developed a Cold Fusion version of the Update Panel by leveraging Microsoft's AJAX client-side library.
The Update Panel is the corner stone of AJAX programming in ASP.NET. Most of the techniques involve using it to replace post-backs with updatable regions without the need to write JavaScript.
Just like the ASP.NET version, BlueDragon allows developers to simply wrap part of their code in special tags to enable partial page rendering. Under normal circumstances, no additional javaScript or server-side code has to be written.
BlueDragon is famous for being the framework MySpace used to port their site to the .NET platform. BlueDragon allows Cold Fusion code to run on the Java and .NET runtimes, with significant performance boosts over the native ColdFusion server.