Since its announcement, Microsoft's Atlas framework has slowly been filtering into the web development community. Using their framework is possible on more than just Microsoft's servers of their ASP.NET language. As this post from Shanku Niyogi illustrates, it can work with PHP as well.

The Atlas framework has two distinct elements - a client script framework, and a set of server extensions that integrate Atlas with ASP.NET. The client script framework is 100% Javascript, and works with any modern browser. But it is also completely server-agnostic, and works with any web server.

Well, not quite. If you're just doing a client-side app, Atlas client script is all you need. But if you want to connect to the server, you'll want to write server-side code to talk to the Atlas client. At the MIX conference a couple of weeks ago, I showed how you can use Atlas with PHP. To do this, I wrote some PHP code providing the server end of the Atlas web services stack, including a base class for implementing REST web services, a class for generating Javascript proxies from these services, and a serializer built on the excellent open-source PHP-JSON serializer.

The PHP example is available for download and they've included a complete walk-through. The simple illustration they show involves working with a web service to grab a series of words from the server.