PHPBuilder.com has continued their series looking at building an Ajax-driven shopping cart with part two posted today (part one here). Last time they laid the PHP foundation for the example app, this time they add another layer - the Ajax functionality to manage the current contents of the cart.

Finally, a link to the shopping cart is provided, although you could just as easily have displayed the cart contents on the same page. For the sake of brevity I'll just show you how to integrate the add feature, and will leave the subtraction mechanism to you as an exercise.

The Ajax frontend calls a managecart.php backend file that calls addToCart and deleteFromCart based on which type of "task" is passed to it.

On the IBuildings blog today, Sandy Pleyte has posted a look at using the ATK framework and what kind of effect its own recently added caching system (atkCache) has on its performance.

Now there is a cache object (atkCache) available in the ATK SVN trunk. The new atkCache class is a factory class, which builds and returns instances of atkCache which has all the methods to communicate with an external cache to handle the actual storage and retrieval.

It supports lots of different backend caching methods - APC, eAccelerator, the Zend Platform functionality, memcache, xcache and both file and variable caching.

He includes an example of its use - creating an object to cache to a file, configuring it with options like lifetime and path, and an example of its use (to cache a theme for a web page).

In this new post to his blog, Richard Heyes talks about an example he's come across of PHP being used as backend behind a large marketing project:

I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.

We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad.

Richard also points out some of his experience trying to market his software and which of his customers are the ones that would provide the most return (the ones looking for updates) and how he can gather their information more productively to further his project's goals.

The DevX.com site has posted some code that gives you methods for passing information back and forth between PHP and a Flash application.

When you need to develop a web form with a special design and great effects, you will probably elect to use Flash. But building and programming Flash forms is considerably different from building standard HTML-based forms. [...] To do that though, you need to know how to access data in the Flash form and (sometimes) how to update the Flash form from PHP as well.

They help you build a sample Flash form as a base to work with in the transfer methods including the ActionScript to get the data out of each field. The tutorial shows the two way communication that's possible - pushing the Flash values out to the PHP script via a getURL() call and pulling the results back in with a call to loadVars() from the PHP script's output.

From the Geeks Not Nerds blog there's the first part of a new series of tutorials looking to help you create your own blogging backend from scratch (PHP5, SQL, HTML and Javascript).

This is the first of a multi part series that will cover designing and building a blog backend from the ground up. The goal of this series is to have a fully functional (albeit simple) blog backend as the final product of the series. We will focus more on good programming technique and design and less on the actual coding of the blog, writing just enough to make a functional example.

They step through the basic design of the application before anything else, laying down the structure for things to come. From there, they move into the database structure for the rest of this part of the series. They even provide the SQL file you'll need to get their structure set up quickly and easily.

On the IBM developerWorks site, the next part of their tutorial series looking at working with AIX and PHP has been posted. This time, there's a focus on integrating a Java business application in using DB2 (version 9) as the backend.

It is possible to develop applications that employ both Java and PHP technology on AIX. You can use the Java programming language for the core logic (or redeploy an existing Java-based application), while gaining the benefits of PHP as a Web-based interface platform. In this article, the third of the series, find out how to connect the core application created in the second installment to a DB2 database for the storage of the survey questions and responses.

They talk some about database roles before working through the DB2 database installation. Then it's time to make the connection to the application, create the table structures and insert information.

On the MSBWare.com site there's a new tutorial looking at the integration of the FCKeditor (a powerful web-based editor that works much like Word) with a MySQL database backend via PHP.

This article is intended to address the lack of documentation in integrating the FCKeditor with your MySQL database. Their tutorials show how to configure and use the editor, but how to get it to save to your database isn't addressed at all. While this article will utilize the MySQL DBMS, the concepts are the same for any DBMS.

They start with the download and install of the editor, including placing it in a page where it can be used (inclusion and configuration). The next step is to wrap the entire editor block in a form to make it submittable and, finally, write the update script to happen on submit. Complete code is included at the end of the tutorial.

PHPBuilder.com has posted part one of a new series looking at using AJAX functionality on your site (along with PHP_ to create a simple form handling script.

So you're interested in AJAX? AJAX is a powerful addition to JavaScript for browser-to-server intercommunication. We will demonstrate a simple script that sends a GET or POST request to a form handling script on a server, then the server script will return a response to the browser XMLHttpRequest JavaScript object.

They start with a definition of what AJAX is and how it can be used before getting into the examples - the first of a simple text field in a form that sends the contents back to the server and the second to fetch dynamic image information from the server.

Vinu Thomas points out an interesting bit of technology in his latest post today - PHPLiveX, a bit of Ajax to PHP "glue" that doesn't require you to know Javascript.

If you're looking for the quickest way to get your PHP functionality Ajax enabled, you've got to take a look at PHPLiveX. It greatly simplifies the process of Ajaxifying your PHP code without knowing Javascript code.

He starts with a simple function to give you an idea of how things tie together. It creates a simple link ("Get Server Time") that fires off the Ajac request to the PHP backend, returning the local server's time - all with about 10 lines of PHP and HTML (well, the needed HTML).

As mentioned by the Zend Developer Zone, the Royal Pingdom website has recently posted their look at what the most popular websites on the internet are running. There aren't many surprises in the list, but we'll save those for later. First, a quote:

TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo and Alexaholic. These are some of the most popular websites on the Internet. You have heard about them, you have read about them and you have most likely used or visited at least one of them. But how often have you read about what these websites are actually running on? This article dives into the facts and figures about the underlying hardware and software that keep these sites running smoothly in spite of their massive popularity.

As mentioned, there's no real surprises in the list - Linux still tops out on the server popularity, Apache and MySQL dominate their fields and, according to the numbers, PHP is still on top in the web world. Of course, there are some that these software just won't meet the needs of, so he mentions those too - Meebo with Lighttpd, Alexaholic with IIS and SQL Server, and TechCrunch/FeedBurner with Java and Tomcat.

Check out this PDF report for the full results of their survey.