Marc Plotz has written up a new tutorial for PHPBuilder.com introducing a simple way to get started combining PHP and Ajax with a "Google Suggest" type of example.

When you use Ajax with PHP, PHP does the calculations that it needs to do on the server and sends the result back to the page. You then use JavaScript to display these results in a predefined place. The demo application you will learn how to build in this article is a very simple Suggestion box, just like the one that Google made famous and thus ushered in the Ajax era.

The example (you can download it here) creates a basic form text field and the Javascript you'll need to make the callback to the waiting PHP script. It doesn't use any external libraries (like jQuery or Prototype) so be ready for bare-bones Javascript.

On the Sony AK Knowledge Center there's a new tutorial showing how to use FusionCharts (Free) to create a real-time charts with no page refresh. FusionCharts is an open source Flash charting component for desktop and web apps.

We will create realtime chart data update that reflect to price fluctuation. There is a line type chart to visualize the price fluctuation. The data of price fluctuation will be fetched from database every 5 seconds using Ajax call and then display the latest 5 (five) data to the chart without any page refresh.

Using FusionCharts and Prototype, they show how to pull information out of a backend MySQL database into a basic graph (HTML and Javascript provided) with a periodic update that grabs the latest from the backend PHP script and pushes it to the graph. You can see an example of the graph here.

In a recent post to the Web Development Blog there's a tutorial about creating a simple script to connect to Flickr and run a search to return matching image thumbnail information.

Our last tutorial about the flickr API was an example on how-to search the flickr photo database for images using some short PHP code. This time we will use parts from the past tutorial together with some jQuery Ajax requests to show our photo search result without reloading the web page.

They include the code for the different parts of the application - the HTML for the frontend form, the Ajax functions to access the PHP backend interface and the PHP code to make the request over to the Flickr API for images matching your search term.

Matt Curry has this recent post looking at the CakePHP Status plugin he's developed and how to add in a custom Ajax-powered panel.

Last time we made a simple panel that showed the last 10 users that signed up for you web app. [...] This time we'll do a panel that shows the number of sign ups based on a time frame. We'll add a drop down that let's you select day, week, month or year and it'll show a breakdown of new users for that period. The updates will use ajax.

He includes the code to create the element, set up the javascript to interface with the backend and the PHP to create the controller for it to interface with. His example grabs the most recent signups from his Users information.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new episode of their "ZendCon Sessions" podcast series as recorded at last year's Zend/PHP Conference in Santa Clara, CA. This time it's a recording of Christian Wenz's "(In)secure Ajax-y Websites with PHP" talk.

Welcome to the ZendCon 2008 edition of the ZendCon Sessions. The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself. [...] This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA and features Christian Wenz giving his talk: "(In)secure Ajax-y Websites with PHP"

You can grab the mp3 of the episode, use the in-page player to listen or subscribe to the podcast feed to get this and other great episodes.

On NETTUTS.com there's a new tutorial they've created showing the development of a "load more" component for your page combining PHP, MySQL and a javascript library (like Mootools or jQuery).

Both Twitter and the Apple App Store use a brilliant technique for loading more information; you click the link and fresh items magically appear on the screen. This tutorial teaches you to use AJAX, CSS, Javascript, JSON, PHP, and HTML to create that magic. This tutorial will also feature both jQuery and MooTools versions of the script.

The idea is that, after the initial load of the page, the user can click on the "load more" link/button and the Ajax request will get the latest results from the backend (via json messaging). The complete code is available for download and you can check out the demo if you'd like to see it in action.

There's a new tutorial from Noupe.com today that walks you through the process of making a customized statistics program by combining HTML, Javascript (some Ajax) and PHP. In this case, they're looking to track the visitors to a website.

When creating a website, one main goal is to attract visitors. Traffic generation is a necessity for monetary purposes, showing off your work, or just expressing your thoughts. There are many ways to create traffic for your website. Search engines, social bookmarking, and word of mouth are just a few examples. But how do you know whether this traffic is genuine? How do you know if your visitors are coming back for a second time?

The application they help you build (demo here) doesn't do any graphic with the data, so you'd need an external tool like JPGraph to create it. It does, however, provide you will the complete code to not only count the total visits from an IP but also which resources were hit and how many times they've been accessed. The backend is a SQLite database accessed through PHP.

Arnold Daniels has a new post to his blog today dealing with something (usually companies) are looking towards to help deal with the infamous "too many passwords for too many places" issue - a simple single sign-on tool that can be dropped in an used anywhere.

Associated websites often share user information, so a visitor only has to register once and can use that username and password for all sites. A good example for this is Google. [...] There are many single sign-on applications and protocols. Most of these are fairly complex. [...] I've written a simple single sign-on solution (400 lines of code), which works by linking sessions. This solutions works for normal websites as well as AJAX sites.

He compares the flow on a non-single sign-on site (lots of fetching between the client/server) and the first/following visits with his tool in place. You can download the source here (as well as the Ajax broker).

Christoph Dorn has posted a guide to integrating the FirePHP tool into your application to aid in Ajax debugging.

My purpose in this column is to introduce you to FirePHP, the problem it solves, and how it is intended to work within your application for maximum benefit. I will present some useful high-level knowledge to make it easier for you to integrate FirePHP into your application. This is not a step-by-step tutorial. I have made a complete demo available for download, along with some useful libraries illustrating all the concepts covered here. I want to emphasize that the demo is only one possible implementation. There are many other possibilities.

He sets up his problem - figuring out a good way to debug Ajax applications without resorting to alert boxes - and the solution he found worked best for him. By using the FirePHP library he could send back the results (or any other information) from the backend call without needing to go through any more hassle than installing Firebug and the FirePHP tool. (Obviously, this only works in Firefox. Internet Explorer users might want to try out Fiddler.)

New on his blog Jani Hartikainen has posted a simple idea that you can take to make sure you're getting the most out of your Ajax/Zend Framework connections.

A common reason to use Ajax in a website is to make it feel faster, so you usually want Ajax requests be processed as quickly as possible. While there are many ways to speed up Zend Framework based applications, there are still some things like routing and dispatching which still add up to the total. There is, however, another way to make Ajax work even faster

Since Ajax requests don't usually require all of the complex routing and dispatching that a normal Zend Framework request might, he recommends creating a separate Ajax handler. His includes an example of a simple searching endpoint with a class handling the backend logic. A simple handler script loads up the bootstrap and makes the request for the search, returning the search results in a JSON format.