Matthew Batchelder describes in his latest post about the other half of an equation he demonstrated in this previous post - the creation of an Ajax handler.

In my recent post on 'Ajax; Templating; and the Separation of Layout and Logic,' I refer to an Ajax Handler that sits server side to handle Ajax calls. Some elaboration is in order.

As I have stated in the past, I'm a huge fan of Prototype AND I choose PHP as my language of choice...so my examples will be using both, but the idea is portable.

His example is a very basic one, pulling in the data from the $_GET values and, with a combination of dynamic function calls and the use of eval(), provides a simple "framework" to handle your Ajax calls. There are two versions of the same thing - one using if statements and the other a switch and various cases.