PHP Ajax and JavaScript

This article is excerpted from Chapter 3 of Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional with permission from Apress. PHP and Ajax While the concept of Ajax contains a handy set of functionality for creating actions on the fly, if you are not making use of its ability to connect to the server, you are really just using basic JavaScript. Not that there is anything truly wrong with that, but the real power lies in joining the client-side f...

This article is excerpted from Chapter 3 of Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional with permission from Apress. Auto-Complete A nice feature that I first noticed as being received positively by the Internet community is the auto-complete feature in Gmail. Basically, when you re entering the e-mail address of the person you re sending a message to, Gmail searches your list of contacts (using Ajax) and automatically drops down a list...

reprinted with permission by Manning Publications Ideally, a user interface (UI) will be invisible to users, providing them with the options they need when they need them but otherwise staying out of their way, leaving users free to focus on the problem at hand. Unfortunately, this is a very hard thing to get right, and we become accustomed, or resigned, to working with suboptimal UIs on a daily basis until someone shows us a better way, and we r...

The abstract factory pattern can be useful if you re developing a PHP application that needs to create diverse objects in multiple contexts. If you re interested in learning the basics of this design pattern, this set of articles might be what you re looking for. Welcome to the second installment of the series Using abstract factory classes in PHP 5. In a step-by-step guide, this series teaches you how to create abstract factory classes in PHP ...

Did you ever have one of those sites that started out small, but kept growing and growing? Adding new pages to a site or removing old ones can often take more time than developing the pages themselves.

As a web programmer, a wide variety of scripting languages are available for you to use. Each language has limitations, but by using more than one in conjunction many of those limitations may be overcome. This article will discuss the benefits of using two such languages, PHP and JavaScript, as well as provide source code for creating a basic demo application.

In this article, you will learn how to combine PHP and JavaScript to create two SELECT menus, one containing categories, and the other containing only those options applicable to the category selected.

Modern websites demand heavy interaction between server-side and client-side programming. In the first part of this article series, we will implement a simple mechanism to make PHP and JavaScript interact, creating a function which can build an array structure and store information in it. It will allow for programmatic data manipulation without server interaction.

In the final article in our series about using PHP and JavaScript to store data on the client side, we will be building on what we learned about server and client interaction to create a JavaScript-based paginating system.

In the first article in this series, we developed a simple PHP function that dynamically generates a JavaScript array and populates it with external incoming data. In this article, we will develop a real world application using this method, in the form of a news ticker.

NOTE: Some of this article comes from Remote Scripting with IFRAME by Eric Costello and Apple Developer Connection; 02/08/2002. It can be found here: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/02/08/iframe.html. Forward In the above-mentioned article, Costello says that Remote Scripting is the process by which a client-side application running in the browser and a server-side application can exchange data without reloading...

Ajax, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is the newest term for a technology that is catching on in popularity. The technology, introduced in 1999, allows a web page, via JavaScript, to make a request back to the server, receive data, and process it without the page ever having to reload. This technique allows for web pages that have automatically updating parts to them or buttons that automatically save data without ever having t...

In an effort to bring high ease of use, some of us provide a HTML styled select or drop-down list of selections the user can make. It s not too hard to have PHP build a variable that holds a select option list such as: ?php$OptionList = ; $First = 1;while ($Row = mysql_fetch_array($Result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) { $ContactID = $Row[ContactID]; $Company = $Row[Company];br

This is the second half of an article that began last week. If you haven t read the first part, please do so before reading on... Creating the PHP Server The PHP RPC server uses the XML_RPC_Server object provided by the PEAR XML-RPC package. Both this and the EmailValidator object will be required in the server: require_once email_validator.php ; require_once XML/RPC/Server.php ; PHP fun...

In this article we will demonstrate how PHP can be used to call upon web services provided by third part sites via an XML-RPC server. We will also show you how to create your own XML-RPC and use client-side Javascript to invoke procedures in your PHP scripts. What is RPC? RPC is an acronym for Remote Procedure Call. As the name suggests, RPC is a technology that provides an interface for making procedure calls over a network. Remote procedure cal...

Although the concept isn t entirely new, XMLHttpRequest technology is implemented on more sites now than ever. Compatibility is no longer an issue (IE, Mozilla and Opera all support it), and the benefits to using it are amazing. There are too many PHP programmers avoiding any work with javascript beyond simple form validation, and for good reason. It s difficult to keep several languages proficiently under your belt. But using the XMLHttpRequest...

This week s article takes off where last week s tutorial left off--we re about to jump into the creation of the PHP backend! If you haven t read the previous article, we recommend that you begin there before moving forward so you don t miss anything. Calling the Functions Now, how is the products.html page supposed to call these functions? We want to be able to let the user select an item, and then load the values based on that selection. Using ...