Understanding Ajax: Getting Started
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What makes Ajax possible is the communication layer with the server. The most complete option is the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object. If XMLHttpRequest is not suitable, hidden IFrames and cookies can also be used. Both will be examined here. By Joshua Eichorn. 1009
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As mentioned by the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new tutorial over on the AnyExample.com website that shows how to get up and working with a PHP+Ajax connection in no time flat. The goal? To handle a file upload asynchronously from the user.   This article contains example application (trivial file-sharing service, like rapidshare, megaupload or yousendit) which uses embedded frames (IFRAME) to upload file. While file is uploaded to hidden frame, user can still access web-page and fill "file description" field.   They talk briefly about the PHP functions that will be used in the tutorial and the concept of using IFRAMEs to handle the content coming in (without reloading the page). The rest of the article is a code dump showing the pieces of (procedural) code to get the job done. There's some commenting, but if you're a new coder to PHP, you might want to check out the main PHP site for some more information on the functions used.
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Gerd Schauffelberger writes on the PHP-Tools Blog today about the contents of the latest issue from the German PHP Magazine, specifically an article covering the PEAR package HTML_AJAX.   This article's target is (1st) to give a brief introduction to AJAX and how things work from Javascript an PHP side in contrary. Also (2nd) I wanted to show that you actually don't have to muck around with a mess of Javascript (browser compatibility issues and such) because it's it is all done by the Joshua Eichorn's HTML_AJAX framework.    The article doesn't build up an entire application (as Gerd mentions) but it does provide you a good base to work from and gives you a good direction to head from to learn more about this powerful package.
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In an "interesting" post to The Codist blog, there's one developer's look at PHP and his confession that he'll never quite understand the appeal of the language.   How PHP can be so popular is beyond me; the whole sense of encouraging all of your html, code, bindings, javascript, even sql (as in the below example) into a single file is a nightmare.   He Goes on to talk about his experience with JSP versus PHP and some perspectives on how PHP lacks features he's used to or how other developers he's talked to had similar issues.   One thing that concerns me (and apparently several others in the PHP community) is that he keeps talking about procedural PHP code that's an "all in one page" kind of setup. Well, of course this can get messy quickly - that's no way to code anything, much less PHP. Organization means more than just breaking code up into chunks on your page (though it's a very low-level start). Plus, the sample code he provides is a joke - a PHP developer with a few weeks of experience could push out something 10x better.
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This week you'll learn about the individual building blocks of Ajax and how they fit together to form the architecture of an Ajax application. Later on these components will be used to create a working Ajax application. By Phil Ballard. 0730
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted a review of Packt Publishing's "Learning PHP Data Objects" book writen up by Akash Mehta.   In Learning PHP Data Objects, the author Dennis Popel examines this new [database access] system and explains how to begin using PDO in development as a replacement for typical database drivers. The book is an excellent introduction to the data abstraction layer and also provides essential insight into the inner workings of database interaction with PHP.   Akash talks briefly about the history of PDO and what it can be used for first, then gets into the contents of the book (things like the intro chapters and the quality of the writing). The thing he thinks makes the bok stand out, though, is the examples and sample code that reflect both simple methods and more complex issues PDO developers might run into.
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Our sister site, AjaxDeveloper.org has a new post today with a request from Joshua Eichorn, the developer of the HTML_AJAX PEAR package for success stories.    If you've used HTML_AJAX to make something cool I'd like to hear from you.  If what you've created is publically accessible that would be even better.  Just leave a comment on this post saying what you've created and given a link to it if you can. Any suggestions on improvements that would make further development easier are also appreciated.     With the HTML_AJAX package being as well-developed as it is, I'm sure that there are more than a few out there using it - so get on over and submit your story today!
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More Ajax with less code Tutorial: In the Introduction to Developing Web Applications with Ajax article we discussed the procedure used to create an Ajax application. As a developer, you probably noticed that the client JSP included a lot of JavaScript. Prototype is a JavaScript library for developing dynamic web applications, which aims to replace much of the JavaScript code in Ajax applications with its own Prototype functions. In this article, weâll develop the same application, but using the Prototype library.â¦
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A new posting from Dynamically Typed - More on rich web UIs - has a few interesting links to share, as well as Harry's search for a XmlHttpRequest method.
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Three-step guide Fundamentally, there's nothing terribly new about the problems posed by Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) when it comes to security, we just need to apply some good old security principles to this new technology.â¦
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted part four of their Ajax Chat Tutorial series (part 1, part 2, part 3) today focusing on enhancing the structure they've already created.   In part 4 of this tutorial we take a look at adding a new MessageAction method to our current Controller. This will expect one piece of information: a new chat message.   Of course, plenty of code is included and they show how to work with JSON messages over XML for simplicity's sake (via an updated IndexController).
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Jason Gilmore dropped us a line to point out the latest edition of his series on this time focusing on form validation with Prototype and a different framework than before, symfony.   These tutorials focused on the increasingly popular CakePHP framework, however in this installment I'll switch gears a bit and instead examine my preferred framework solution: symfony. Specifically, I'll show you how symfony's built-in support for the Prototype JavaScript framework can greatly enhance the user experience within your applications.   Jason introduces the Prototype library and a simple version of how it's used with a form to do a little validation. The next step is integrating it with something useful - a site built up inside the symfony framework (you'll need to know how to use it already).
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DevShed launches a new tutorial series today with this new article, an introductory look at using the PDO objects in PHP5.   As you may have seen at first glance, the PDO extension looks really useful in certain situations. In this three-part series, I'm going to introduce its most important features, by accompanying the corresponding theoretical concepts with numerous hands-on examples, in this way facilitating the respective learning curve.   They start the series off with a look at using the extension and connecting to a resource (in their case, a MySQL database). Then, it's on to performing queries and grabbing the last inserted IDs for the rows your script just put in.
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The term Ajax is often referred to as a new type of technology, but is actually several technologies that work together. How it does so is the subject of this article. By Lee Underwood. 1114
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If you've ever had the frustration of working with Ajax in Internet Explorer and have noticed it caching the requests/results, you might want to check out this new post on the JSLabs blog for a helpful hint.   While working on an AJAX project over the weekend, I ran into the following issue: (through a GET request), every time I tried to call a certain function, It was returning the same data (which was supposed to be different each time)   First, he tried just changing the headers (via PHP's header function) to see if IE would understand the new message, but to no avail. He finally figured out that, despite whatever headers were sent or how much the content changed, what he really needed to do was to provide the script some kind of unique identifier with each request (just appended to the url) so that IE knew the request was different. His weapon of choice was a date/time value.
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According to this latest blog entry, Joshua Eichorn has released the latest version of his PEAR package combining PHP and Ajax - HTML_AJAX 0.3.4.    HTML_AJAX 0.3.4 was released today, it contains lots of bug fixes so if you use HTML_AJAX youâll want to upgrade.  Release notes and testing results are available on the wiki, and the examples are available online if you want to see some of the basic features.    According to the Changelog some of the fixes include: an update to assignAttr in HTML_AJAX_Action, Request timeouts errors, std input when HTTP_RAW_POST isn't set, and a few more. You can get this latest release here...
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