This is a demonstration of a very fast and easy way to build AJAX-type applications where communications between JavaScript on the client side and PHP5 on the server side is ideal. This library makes development of such systems fast and very simple.

In his example he shows how to create the PHP and Javascript functions that let the service talk back and forth. He defines a simple "Hello World" style application to show how it would be structured. He also includes a bit of more complex that has other functionality - getting a value out of an array and returning a property/private variable from the backend class.

Here's the list of the parts of the series:

• Part 1 - introduction, sample usage
• Part 2 - problems in making an event-based ajax callback model (and his solutions)
• Part 3 - the use of JSON in the framework
• Part 4 - implementation of the Scriptifiable interface
• Part 5 - implementing the Remotable interface

You can download the latest version of his Ajax framework directly from his blog.

Several members of the community have already blogged about it including:

• Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Andi himself
• Wolfram Kriesing
• this FAQ from the Zend Developer Zone detailing the partnership

So far, all of the comments have been good and the partnership has been well received. Matthew included in hist post a few of the places they're already planning on "ajaxing" in the Zend Framework (including the forms and the JSON-RPC server).

The prolific Michael McLauglin just sent me a copy of his other new book "Oracle Database AJAX & PHP Web Application Development", co-written with Lee Barney.

The book looks at how to build "faster, lighter and more responsive Web applications while reducing code support and creation time". There's chapters on scalability, the basics of Ajax, PDO and multimodel communications.

Finally, a link to the shopping cart is provided, although you could just as easily have displayed the cart contents on the same page. For the sake of brevity I'll just show you how to integrate the add feature, and will leave the subtraction mechanism to you as an exercise.

The Ajax frontend calls a managecart.php backend file that calls addToCart and deleteFromCart based on which type of "task" is passed to it.

In the latest installment of this ongoing PHP series, I'll show you how to build a shopping cart using PHP, session handling, and the Prototype JavaScript library. The cart allows users to add and delete products from the cart, as well as change cart quantities. And of course, the interaction is seemingly instantaneous, allowing for the user to continue shopping without waiting for the page to reload.

They start from the ground up - making the database tables, inserting some data - before writing up the simple PHP class with methods like deleteFromCart and getCart. This lays the foundation for the next article in the series where they add in a splash of ajax to make it a bit more user-friendly.

In summary, View Helpers are great for encapsulating forms, grids and other functionality that could eventually be bound to a different data source or even be pushed back to the user through a simple AJAX call.

Example code on how to use them is included showing a sample helper that adds Ajax functionality to a form's submit and pushes the response values back out into a div on the page.

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.