NetTuts.com has started up a new tutorial series perfect for those wanting to get into PHP frameworks for modern hybrid (PHP backend, Javascript frontend) applications. This is the first part of their series introduces you to the technologies they'll be using and helps you get the basics setup.

In this series we’re going to build a web billboard application from scratch, we’re going to use CodeIgniter to handle the back-end service and BackboneJS for the web client. In the first two parts of the series we’ll create the back-end service and then the client application in the last two.

They walk you through the steps to to set up a MongoDB to handle the data for the backend and configuring CodeIgniter to work with it. He helps you get it set up to handle REST requests from the BackboneJS frontend too (including OPTIONS handling). He shows how to parse the input and handle the output as well as models to connect to the database resources and how to handle sessions.

New on CodeForest.com today, Luka Peharda has posted the first part of a series that combines the Slim microframework with backbone.js to make a simple tasks (to-do) application.

The app in this tutorial will be called “Tasks”. I know, right? Super creative. This first article will give an introduction to the technologies and the idea of the series. Also, we’ll cover project structure and entire PHP side of the story. In second article we’ll cover Backbone.js side of the story and create simple tasks application which we’ll refine and upgrade in later articles (third and fourth one).

They introduce the two technologies (briefly) and get right in to the directory and database structure they'll be using. They use the NotORM library for accessing the database. Code is included showing the routes for getting, adding, updating and deleting tasks out of the database.

Jason Hinkle has a new blog post on VerySimple.com today about some recent work he's done to integrate Backbone.js and PHP (via the Phreeze framework's "Builder" tool).

Last year like a lot of other developers I started to get excited about client-side Javascript frameworks. [...] To me it’s basically a little bit of magic that makes your web application seem alive as it responds to any changes made to the data. Backbone.js is one such Javascript framework.

You can use the Builder as a part of the framework application or just use it as an example of how to integrate Backbone.js into a PHP application. The interface for it is nice and clean (and functional) and works with the frameworks' REST interface. You can see it in action in the video and live demo of the sample application.