Review: Beginning Ajax with PHP

Beginning Ajax with PHP (by Lee Babin) is a good introduction to learning JavaScript client-server techniques on the PHP platform.

Some of the scenarios Lee walks you through:
* Sexy client-side Calendars (that can be built / communicate with the server)
* Auto-completion (a la GMail’s compose recipient, etc)
* Form validation (that leverages Ajax)
* Dynamic thumbnail generation
* etc

The book then walks one through creating a real-world Ajax-powered photo gallery app. Lee also touches on interacting with SOAP web services and the Google Maps API.

All in all, definitely worth a read if you are a PHP developer and are looking for a good primer on Ajax-based technologies.

Beginning Ajax with PHP (Amazon)

MyToday : AJAX & Mobile RSS aggregator

MyToday is a public RSS aggregator providing the latest news, views and content on a topic-based collection of feeds, called Dailies. Now it may seem like yet another RSS aggregator but one of the things it features is WML/WAP version of the page (ofcourse its not AJAXed )

MyToday.com is a public RSS aggregator providing the latest news, views and content on a topic-based collection of feeds, called Dailies. It is simultaneously available on the web through an Ajax client and on the mobile phone in WML.

Personal aggregators like bloglines.com, my.yahoo.com, live.com etc. give the users an empty plate which needs to be filled with feeds which the user knows about. This approach ignores the fact that users in general are interested in a subject but not necessarily aware about quality feeds and sources in that area. A public aggregator like MyToday.com depends on editorial expertise to choose and pick the best sources in a subject. This way, the reader can get going without any sweat.

The Authors/Creators, have posted a nice long list of how it is better than other popular readers and aggregators compared to MyToday. But I do have a feeling that the design could have been a bit more better.

How vSocial Went from 0 to 71 Million Page Views in (about) 120 Days

Ajax Blog had a chance recently to sit down with the breakout team of vSocial.com.

We wanted to pick the brains of the vSocial founding team and learn about: starting a new social networking site, building a large-scale, high-bandwidth web app, developing with Ajax, building traffic/buzz, life hacks, and more.

The numbers speak for themselves: vSocial has gone from 0 to 71M+ monthly page views, 270K+ unique daily visitors and 45M videos served a month … all in about 120 days!

Brad Webb and Mark Sigal of vSocial were kind enough to sit down with Ajax Blog for the following interview. Enjoy!

Can you describe how the company or concept behind vSocial.com came about?

The core platform behind vSocial was developed over the past three years (with vSocial’s other co-founder, Brent Oesterblad) as part of a general purpose social media platform for uploading and sharing pictures, music, movies and other rich media content items. Looking at the market mid-last year, it was clear that Internet video was about to hit in a big way, and we felt that we had a lot of “secret sauce” to bring to the equation so we opted to focus there. The underlying platform is quite feature rich, and we expect to roll more of it out into the market in the coming months.

(Cont’d…)

Read the full interview: How vSocial Went from 0 to 71 Million Page Views in (about) 120 Days

Ajax Browser in a Browser - Gollum

This is a neat “browser in a browser” Ajax application. It makes Wikipedia beautiful, simple and lovely, almost more like an OS X dashboard widget application than the gigantically time-sucking wonderful website that it is. Beautiful.

Neat use of forward / back, nicely designed. As nice as this is, I don’t think I’ll be switching from using Google to find articles in Wikipedia anytime soon. But this is a really really neat and clean way of searching it.

It would also be neat if it could be pointed at other data sources / web sites than just Wikipedia.

By the way, the tranlsation editor seems like a great way to do that. Instant translation of the strings…

Gollum is GPL, and it looks like the source code will be available soon.

Gollum is based on PHP and Javascript using XMLHttp request for communication, better known as Ajax. That means, there is no need for databases and the code is ready for PHP5. Therefore, the client is only required to use a browser like Firefox, MS Internet Explorer, Netscape or Safari with activated Javascript. Safari has yet to be tested.

Visit Gollum: Gollum, the Wikipedia Browser

Ajax without the X? - Good article about combining a generic Javascript new script engine with some PHP to deliver simple AJAX interactions

If you’ve wrestled with the whole XMLHttpRequest part of AJAX you should read this article. It clearly explains the technique of appending a new Javascript SCRIPT tag into the body and using the results to display new or updated content.

But there is one problem with most of the current implementations of Ajax: it has one dependency, and that is the XmlHttpRequest object. Most modern browser, like Firefox, have inbuilt support for this object, but older browsers, like Internet Explorer 6, don’t have native support for this object. Luckily, IE 6 does support it, but it’s built in as an ActiveX control, which means your visitors get an ugly warning message about the possible danger of an ActiveX control, or in some cases it just doesn’t work at all.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to use Ajax without even having to use the XmlHttpRequest object.

Read the article: PHPit - Totally PHP - Ajax & PHP without using the XmlHttpRequest Object

Via digg where there’s some good discussion going on about this technique.

Simple and clear example of how to create a MySQL connection with PHP/AJAX

This is a good and simple example of doing one very clear action — sending a command to open a MySQL database connection through the AJAX transport layer. It includes downloadable code examples as well to get you started.

Filed under, “Roll-your-own-Ajax” department.

In this tutorial I will explain how to open a mysql database connection using PHP and the all popular AJAX. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the XMLHttpRequest object works within php and the advantages of using it.

Read the full article: Creating a MySQL connection with PHP/AJAX at John Wiseman

Holy Grail of PHP?

It was nice to see a very basic overview (with code examples) finally of how you actually implement Ajax in PHP in an end-to-end system.

PEAR’s DB_DataObject is a bit like Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord, though DB_DataObject has more of a code generation flavor than Object-Relational Mapping.

TurboDbAdmin: Ajax-powered Database Administration

TurboDbAdmin is an ajax-based database admin tool for MySQL. It’s built on 100% PHP, TurboWidgets and the Dojo Toolkit.

Could this be the killer of the ubiquitous phpMyAdmin?

PhpMyAdmin does a fine job in a Web 1.0 world, but I can’t wait to try TurboDbAdmin!

UPDATE: Live online demo available here.

Requirements and Supported Browsers

Requirements

* PHP 4 or higher
* MySql 3 or higher

Supported

* Firefox
* Mozilla
* IE5 or higher

Build an AJAX application in php in minutes with symfony

Build an AJAX application in php in minutes with symfony

Easy Ajax in symfony

Overview

Symfony has Ajax helpers that make programming an elaborate interface a piece of cake. This tutorial will show you step-by-step how to create an Ajax-powered symfony application in minutes.

This PHP framework presents a nice screencast demonstrating how easy it is to create an ajaxified web application. This is very very similar to the Ruby on Rails demonstration application, which is really cool, to see people boil it down to a demo-able screen capture movie.

Looks interesting, will check this out. They’re using code from the scrip.aculo.us library in their online demo.

http://www.symfony-project.com/

New release of PAJAJ: PHP Asynchronous Javascript and JSON

New release of PAJAJ out on Freshmeat. Check it out, it even includes a nice PHP Google Maps interface tag. Hehehhehehe.

PAJAJ Information

Methodology

What is the PAJAJ framework, it stands for (PHP Asynchronous Javascript
and JSON). It is a object oriented Ajax framework written in PHP5 for
development of event driven PHP web applications. The framework follows
5 basic principles:

1. Simple:

   You do not have
   to be an expert at PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to use the framework.
   You can do most, if not all, your coding in PHP, and the framework will
   generate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for you. There are object for most
   of the HTML element, with method to manage common task, like updating
   the content of a Div or items in a forms Select pull down. A lot of the
   other frames include a simple example that is anything but simple. For
   my simple example I have been asked where the rest of the code is!

2. Develop how you want:

   the framework supports 3 different development models: i. the developer
   develops the whole application and interface in PHP, since the
   framework knows about HTML elements you want to interact with, i.e.
   there are objects for Select, Div, Table with instances with unique
   IDs; it is easy to have the framework generate simple html and CSS for
   you. ii. A designer generate a pretty but dump page, and you then hook
   events to it to make it a real application (see Last Binding of Event
   below) iii. You design an interface as a template (example Smarty), and
   have the framework make html, CSS, Javascript that you pore into the
   template.

3. Event Driving:

   I would rather have events delivered to the back-end, and decide there
   what actions to take then to write a lot of JavaScript in the
   front-end. What happens after an event?:

   1. The front-end gather information about the state of the page
   2. The back-end see if there is an event handler registered for this event
   3. If there is a registered event handler, it is call with the information from step i.
   4. After processing data is return back, if any, to page for processing:

   When an event happens there are 3 action that can be taken:

   1. Preprocessor Action: example setting a spinning hour glass gif, to tell the use that something is happening.
   2. Postprocessor Action: do something standard with the data that comes back, like update a div.
   3. Back-end delivers code to front-end: have the back-end tell the front-end what it want to do, or message the user.

4. Late Binding of Events:

   The pages HTML does not need to changed event and there logic (event
   handlers) are bound at run time. So your wed designer could delivery a
   pretty, but dump from, and without changes to the HTML you can make it
   into a AJAX enabled application. This make for simpler markup and an
   easier separation of design and code.

5. Object Oriented:

   There are not only objects for the Ajax plumbing, but for page elements
   that you are interacting with. The page element objects have method to
   make this interact easier to program.

Go to PAJAJ - GPL PHP JSON / AJAX library

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