On the NETTUTS.com site there's new tutorial showing you how to combine the power of PHP and jQuery to create a quick and easy star rating system for your web application.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a rating system with AJAX, PHP, and jQuery. Votes will be recorded and updated in real-time with the magic of AJAX, and we’ll also leverage the power of PHP so that you don’t even need a database!

The Ajax portion of the script is handled by a "$.post" request made from jQuery to the PHP backend when a star is clicked. Once the message is sent to the PHP backend, the information is serialized and pushed into a text file. This method can easily be modified to work with a database too.