Anatomy of an Ajax Application
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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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From UnixReview.com, there's a handy guide to functionality that PHP supports to help you get a handle on things like multiple socket requests - multi-tasking in PHP.    There's quite a bit more to tell, though, about PHP and concurrency. AJAX certainly boasts multi-tasking capabilities, and PHP supports AJAX about as well as the other Web languages support Ajax. An easy conclusion is that, by way of AJAX, therefore, PHP multi-tasks. However, common security, accessibility, and compatibility requirements prevent use of AJAX in many programs.   It's also true that PHP does not "support threads", as many observers put it. Even without AJAX, even without threads, there are still at least two distinct ways to achieve server-side multi-tasking with PHP. Let's look at how the language multi-tasks, and why:    They give an example of one way to fetch information from multiple sources normally (concurrent socket requests) to provide the "low level". They then show an example of how to use pcntl_fork, pcntl_exec, and streams support that can be built into PHP to create a three process function to grab the main pages (and status codes) from each of the sites in an array.
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Joshua Eichorn is back today with the answers to the questions as posed by the readers of his blog previously.   Your AJAX answers from my AJAX questions post are below, I hope everyone finds them helpful.   The questions answered include:  How can I find out whether a connection is broken? Why would you want to use HTML_AJAX when there are far better tools for the job, pure javascript solutions such as prototype or jquery? What is the best way to 'degrade' a website when Javascript/XMLHttpRequest support is disabled? When utilizing an AJAX API such as Google Maps, how do you execute embedded Javascript commands in a page generated on-the-fly?    ...as well as a few more. Where appropriate, he also includes code to help illustrate his point.
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The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest poll conducted over this past week asking which, of their given options, is the best helpful hint for creating a web application in PHP.   Two of the options ranked higher than the rest with one (Page/object caching) coming out on top of the other (Don't save performance testing for the end of the project). The remainder of the votes were divided pretty evenly between the last three options: "Use multi result set queries to your database", "gzip compression", and "Tune your web server".   While you're in the polling mood, you should check out this week's new poll that wonders which of their options might be the biggest hindrance to PHP5's adoption in the community.
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Knut Urdalen shares a note about the latest issue of the International PHP Magazine - the December 2007 issue - that he has an article in.   The December issue of International PHP Magazine includes my latest article "Seamless AJAX with PRADO - An introduction to ActiveControls". In this article I discuss some AJAX design patterns and show you how to make use of them in AJAX enabled components that ships with the PRADO framework.   More information about this issue (and subscribing to the International PHP Magazine) can be found on this page of their site and details on the PRADO framework are over on the project's website.
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AJAX Toolkit Framework upgrade to help consolidate frameworks and extend supported browsers.
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Ajax Magazine has posted a new interview with Joshua Eichorn, the author of the PEAR HTML_AJAX package about who he is, details on the package, and what's to come.    I have contacted Joshua Eichorn, author of HTML_AJAX for an interview and as promised here is the interview. I asked Joshua about AJAX, HTML_AJAX, his experience, projects, current status,future projects and much more.    The interviewer starts off with general questions - who is he, how did he get started in PHP - that sort of thing. There's a mention of the time that Joshua has worked on phpDocumentor as well as his involvement in a local user group. They move on to the harder questions, talking about "why PEAR?" and what's next for the package's development...
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PHPBuilder.com has posted part two of their look at combining Ajax and PHP. They take things a step further than last time and look at the actual communication between the script and the server.   AJAX and PHP 5 both have powerful features for processing and using an XML document. XML is a method of formatting data often for communication purposes between different computer systems. In this article, we will show you how to access an XML document with AJAX!   They create a script that can load the XML information from a file and echo it back out to the waiting client script. They also include the other half - the client-side javascript that grabs the XML information, parses it, and pushed it into a javascript object for easy access.
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If you've ever needed a good project to get started with combining PHP and Ajax, you should definitely take a look at this new tutorial from the PHPHacks.com website today. They demonstrate how to create a simple RSS reader combining the power of PHP and the client-side abilities of Ajax.   They start by explaining some of the terms they'll be working with, including:  RSS - and an example document XSL - to help create the RSS feed SimpleXML - to read in and parse the info from a remote server  After that, they jump right in, creating their first file - the main functionality for the application (on the PHP side). They opt to do everything by hand and not use any of the frameworks that are already out there so you can really understand what goes into it. They provide all of the code you'll need to get things set up, including the CSS to get things nice and styled and a few usage examples to show you how it all ties in together.
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Free and independent Ajax developers are turning away from commercial development tools and opting for free, open source alternatives.â¦
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Joshua Eichorn has posted this new tutorial to his site today, a detailed look at how to add Ajax to just about any site out there with the help of the HTML_AJAX PEAR package.    When looking at a adding AJAX you have a couple decisions you'll want to make up front. One is what tools your going to use. In the webthumb case thats pretty easy. Webthumb is a simple PHP app and doesn't use a framework, so I need a nice general PHP/AJAX framework that is easy to use, HTML_AJAX fits that need.   After picking my tools I need to decide what my goals are. My main focus will be to improve usability, but I also want to use AJAX to make the site seem a bit flashier, so its a bit of a technology demo too.    He uses his own current project, Webthumb as an illustration of his points including looks at remoting, a RequestStatus class, exporting a class with the HTML_AJAX package, and finally, making the Ajax calls.
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In this new tutorial from WebReference, they show you how to develop a simple database-enabled Ajax application in PHP.   In this article you'll learn how to create database-enabled Ajax requests using PHP and MySQL. We begin by creating the front-end HTML and JavaScript files used to make requests to the server-side. The requested server-side is a PHP file which bridges the gap between Ajax and a PHP object that connects to a MySQL database and returns results as an XML response to the Ajax engine.   The application is a simple way to enter news postings into a database and pull them back out with this handy Javascript functionality. They also provide the complete source code for download to help you get started.
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Jim Plush has posted an offifical release announcement about his latest contribution to the PHP community - a debugging tool combining PHP (through the myBIC framework) and the Firefox FireBug extension.   I put together a couple pieces of technology to give the PHP community a debugger/profiler that should make life easier in the "web2.0" world. Are you tired of echo'ing print statements in your ajax calls? Writing to log files? Firing up big ol debuggers just to see what the value of some array is? Well look no further than the new MyBic PHP Debugger.   The tool is a smaller part of his larger MyBIC framework and can do things like writing log files, echo information back out to the screen, and communicate information back out to the Firefox user. There is a standalone version of FireBug that will be posted for those that don't want to have to install an entire framework to use it.   Keep an eye out (here and on his blog) for the links to the release when it's posted. In the meantime, you can check out a screencast [mov] of the package in action or just the screenshots in the blog entry.
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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.
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Over on Dynamically Typed there is a two posting series on efforts to get javascript to talk to PHP effectively.
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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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