In a recent post to the Zend Developer Zone Vikram Vaswani takes a look at using AJAX quickly and easily in your applications with the help of the HTML_AJAX PEAR package.

Well, PHP is commonly used on the server end of the connection, to handle AJAX requests and send back responses. But that isn't all it can do - with a little PEAR package called HTML_AJAX, you can use PHP to significantly simplify the work that goes into building and deploying an AJAX application. That's where this article comes in. Over the next few pages, I'm going to give you a quick run-down on the PEAR HTML_AJAX class, together with a few examples of how you can use it to AJAX-ify various Web applications.

He goes through the whole process - installing the package and five example scripts to show it in action:

• Pulling from a simple database table of book and author information
• Calculating simple interest
• Creating a simple calendar
• Evaluating an inputted number
• Simple login validation