Joshua Eichorn's Blog: You got AJAX questions I got Answers
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Joshua Eichorn, being the generous soul that he is, is offering in his latest post to answer any Ajax questions his readers might want to know about.    Have you wondered whats the easiest way to submit a form using AJAX, what the status of HTML_AJAX development is, or what is covered in Understanding AJAX?   Well nows your chance.    To get your question(s) in, just submit them as a comment on this post and he'll come back in a few days with the answers.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPBuilder.com: AJAX and PHP Part 2 - XML Communication/ProcessingCommunity News: Zend Framework 1.0.0 ReleasedMike Potter's Blog: Slides for today's e-seminar on Flex and PHPBlogSecurity.net: Interview with Stefan Esser on WordPressCommunity News: India's First PHP UnconferencePro::PHP Podcast: Newscast for 2007.06.28JSLabs Blog:  How to create Microsoft Office Documents with PHPPEAR Blog: Request for ideas: New developer FAQPHP-Coding-Practices.com: Composing Methods: Split Temporary VariableRob Allen's Blog: Spanish versions too!
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This week we look at a brief overview of AJAX, some relevant JavaScript 1.3 enhancements, how to run the example and using the script within your own Web page. By Rob Gravelle. 0123
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In a new posting from Joshua Eichorn's weblog today, he talks about the latest PHP London meeting and the final topic of the night - his work with phpDocumentor.
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Now that Ajax is becoming a standard for handling interactions on the Web it's time to use it to update form submissions. In this article you'll learn how to create a reusable Ajax process for all forms. The source code and a working demo is included. By Kris Hadlock. 0829
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A few days back there was a post on the "The Codist" blog about why the author would never quite understand the appeal of PHP to the masses and some of his thoughts behind it. Well, there was such an outcry and response to his comments that he's written up another post on what he learned from comments made.   Clearly I touched a nerve. However I did learn a lot of things that you don't read in a quickly tutorial on PHP. The whole point of writing something is to get feedback, positive or negative, and hopefully learn from it.   He admits that his experience with PHP and its developers has been limited, so his perspective might have been thrown off a bit. He still holds to one thing from the previous article, though - that PHP just isn't for him.
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The DeveloperTutorials website has a new tutorial posted today that covers their method for combining Ajax and PHP to create a custom form handler.   For this project, I needed a form to send an email to the client once it's been validated and checked to be ok. [...] I decided to spice things up a bit with a little AJAX and a few effects from Scriptaculous. So let's dive into exactly how I did it.   They create their form first - a standard user info type of thing - and set it up to use the WForms validation script in PHP. They include the Javascript the script needs to run the validation and to handle sending the form's contents back out via an email.
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When everything gets an API then everything you can imagine will be possible if you can write a script.  And sometimes, to give you an idea, all that has to happen is that a wall come down. The latest, most intriguing such wall was the paywall at the NY Times. Now all of a sudden we find the wealth of information published by the NY Times over many decades is available without tariff. More important, we can point into the archive. We've gotten so accustomed to the wall, that you actually have to think when it may be possible to go in there, as if it left behind a wall in our minds, even after the wall on the web is gone. For example, the first episode of Ken Burns's The War, an epic series about World War II from the American perspective, cited several NY Times articles. If you looked carefully you could see the dates, and the actual headlines, and then if you have a browser handy, as I do (I have an iPhone) you can actually read the article while the narrative continues. Today this is mostly a gimick, but I suspect as we get used to having history so available (like having a library microfilm machine, which I used to spend whole days playing with when I was a kid) it will change our sense of information, perhaps as much as anything else that's ever been on the web. Take movie reviews for example. What a thrill to be able to read a review of a movie that I love that came out in 1932! The reviewers back then were more forgiving, less sarcasting, more enthusiastic. Consider their review of the Hollywood Revue of 1929, a favorite of mine that I've only seen once (I'd pay for a DVD, if it were available). They loved audible movies (that's what they called them) as if the term "talkie" was as elusive as "podcast" was in the summer of 2004. Again, we've just scratched the surface. Wouldn't you like to have NY Times movie reviews integrated with Netflix? Or have Yahoo's movie rating service available on the NY Times site. And I have to wonder whether they really have gone all the way. You can't see the reviews unless you're logged in. Can Google's robots, therefore, see the movie reviews? Unless the've made some special arrangements, it seems not.  It would be helpful to get a technical guide to the newly hatched NY Times on the Web, or (as in the old days of software) a reviewer's guide, so we get some ideas of what to look at. Clearly a lot of work went into opening up the Times archive. I'm going to be in NY the week of October 8 and will have some time toward the end of the week. If anyone at the Times would be willing to spend some time with me reviewing what's now open, that would be helpful. In any case, at least the Times today is somewhat more available to be integrated into the fabric of the web. That's some progress. How much, remains to be seen. Postscript: Kottke did a great job of skimming the surface of the newly opened Times when it first came online, just one week ago today.
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted an official call for help for a PHPUnit-related project that seems to be a more and more requested feature for the popular unit testing package - an Ajax-based test runner.   It would be great if the frontend for the browser-based test runner would make use of AJAX. Since I am clueless when it comes to both web design in general and AJAX in particular, I would appreciate if someone else could help me with implementing this test runner.   He's looking for the XHTML, CSS, and Javascript to put it all together as well as the Javascript that makes the magic happen. If you're interested in helping out, you can either contact him on the mailing list or in #phpunit on the Freenode IRC network.
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Joshua Eichorn mentions today about the "digital shortcut" created for his upcoming book "Understanding Ajax" from Prentice Hall.    A chapter from my book, Understanding AJAX has been made available as a digital shortcut. This chapter covers the different ways you can use the data you transfer using XMLHttpRequest.   Document centric approaches based on HTML and XML are described as well as various RPC approaches are shown.    The shortcut focuses on consuming data sent back in an XML or JSON format (and costs $9.99 USD). Joshua notes that he, personally, tends more towards "JSON based RPC approaches or HTML document based approaches" for his communication method. He also mentions client-side XSLT as an alternative to having to parse through and style the large amounts of data returned.
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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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As a companion to the podcast version of his review, Matthew Turland has posted his comments in text form over on his blog today.   I received an e-mail recently from a very nice gentleman at Packt Publishing - their representative asked if I would be willing to review one of their books, namely PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects by Shu-Wai Chow. Reviewing books is not something I had done before, so I thought I would give it a good old-fashioned college try.   He mentions the size of the book (and how it's not an indication of the quality) and the basic structure of the book, including spotlights on some of the specific topics covered.
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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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Looking to bolster AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and development of Web 2.0 applications, the OpenAjax Alliance on Wednesday plans to introduce a project that addresses AJAX interoperability issues.
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Russ asks: Where's the OpenSocial container API? I love Russ because he cuts through all the BS and gets right to the core, most basic question, and he doesn't care who he pisses off. That's my kind of developer. You can't lie to the compiler, when the bits hit the road, you gotta know what garbage goes in and what garbage comes out.  (Ahh programmer's humor!) In other words, suppose I wanted to compete with Google, MySpace, Plaxo and LinkedIn, well, where's the spec that shows me how to do that? Well, of course I don't know, they aren't communicating with riffraff like me, but I have some experience with this kind of stuff, so I can hazard a guess. If they publish a spec,all kinds of projects will likely get started to enable the API in (just for the sake of argument): Drupal, WordPress, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Scripting News (why not add widgets to a random blog), CNN, The New York Times, well you get the idea. There might be lots of implementations very quickly. And that would be it for changes. It would be frozen de facto, they'd have to live with what they have, which given how quickly it was thrown together, probably isn't very good. Not the kind of stuff you'd like to support for the next decade or two. Or maybe they would break everyone, something guaranteed to make them a lot of enemies, much the way Microsoft did, and they were good at migration of APIs.  Google is good at doing AJAXy web UIs, they make users happy, but they're not very good at APIs. This one is a loser, for sure. That's the answer to Russ's question. It's probably not malice that keeps them from releasing details to everyone outside their club, it's pragmatism. They have to try to hold on to it to keep it from becoming even more of a mess than it already is. Just my opinion, for what it's worth. I've been wrong many times before.
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As mentioned over on Ajaxian.com, there's a new Ajax framework in town that's looking to "ease the development of rich Ajax applications, by generating the appropriate JavaScript code" - AjaxCore.   AjaxCore takes all the dirty work of JavaScript code generation and provides a solid foundation. The concept is to extend a Generic AjaxCore class and defining methods that handle the Ajax driven events and binding them to HTML objects.   It uses Prototype to work with the DOM and Ajax connections and to help you with binding the scripts to the different elements on the page. Code can be linked to certain elements and have that (server-side) code automatically executed when an element is referenced. You can find out more from the AjaxCore homepage and the Ajaxian post also includes a simple inline example to get you started.