In his latest post David Müller covers some of the things to consider when working with cross-domain ajax requests including CORS and iframes.

As it is widely known, AJAX Requests are only possible if port, protocol and domain of sender and receiver are equal. [...] Having this cleared out, we will cover ways around this restriction.

He covers three main approaches to allowing these cross-domain requests (and some of the security implications that can come with them):

• CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing)
• JSONP (Javascript with a local domain callback)
• Iframes

He also briefly mentions things like window.postMessage (HTML5) and the use of a backend script to proxy a request into your application's local code.

Rob Allen has a quick tutorial posted to his site today showing you how to send an email with the ZendMail component of the Zend Framework 2 that contains HTML but provides a plain text backup in the same message.

Sending a multi-part email with ZendMail is easy enough, but if you want to send an HTML email with a text alternative, you need to remember to set the content-type in the headers to multipart/alternative. As this is the second time I had to work this out, I'm noting it here for the next time I forget!

The rest of the post is the code you'll need to send a simple email with a text and HTML body sections, configure the headers (to, from, etc) and the "multipart/alternative" header to make the HTML or plain text switching work correctly.

In the latest post to his blog James Morris looks at using XPath's query() function to locate pieces of data in your XML.

The other day I needed to do some html scraping to trim out some repeated data stuck inside nested divs and produce a simplified array of said data. My first port of call was SimpleXML which I have used many times. However this time, the son of a bitch just wouldn't work with me and kept on throwing up parsing errors. I lost my patience with it and decided to give DomDocument and DOMXpath a go which I'd heard of but never used.

He includes a code (and XML document) example showing how to extract out some content from an HTML structure - grabbing each of the images from inside a div and associating them with their description content.

On NetTuts.com they're posted a new tutorial about using the Stripe service to accept credit cards on your site. Thanks to some handy libraries they provide, integration is a relatively simple process.

Until recently, accepting credit cards on a website was expensive and complicated. But that was before Stripe: a radically different and insanely awesome credit card processing company. Today, I'll show you how to start accepting cards in 30 minutes or less - without spending a dime.

They step you through the whole process you'll need to get the full flow set up:

• Install an SSL Certificate (on your server)
• Create an Account
• Create Your Payment Form
• Collect The Form Values
• Request a Token
• Create a Server-Side Script

Screenshots of the Stripe interface, HTML, Javascript and PHP code are all included - everything you need to make the simple card handling work. One of the keys to how Stripe deals with credit cards is that you provide it the card info, it gives you a token. Your app uses this to work with the card instead of storing the card information in your database (also making it more secure).

PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial today showing how you can use phpQuery to work with HTML in your application. phpQuery is a server-side CSS-selector-driven based on jQuery's API.

Think about how you can change and manipulate the generated HTML using server-side PHP code. phpQuery is the ultimate solution that will come to your mind. If you haven't heard about phpQuery, you may be interested in this article since I am going to give you a brief introduction to phpQuery and explain how you can use it in real-world projects.

The tutorial shows you how to generate a simple table with alternating row colors (zebra) and column headers from an array of product information. They also talk a bit about why using something server-side like this is important (over something client-side like jQuery) - how it can make things easier by keeping the "business logic" all in one place, leaving your frontend to do what it does best.

Danne Lundqvist has a new post where he shares a bit of code he's written to "come to grips" with an existing XML structure.

Very often I find myself writing input filters for large XML files using PHP. Common enough task; and PHP offer a great variety of tools to do this effectively depending on the situation. Unfortunately, almost as common is the lack of documentation for the aforementioned XML files. [...] I have looked around for a simple tool but I didn't really find a tool that gave me the quick and dirty overview I wanted. A year or so ago I finally wrote a small PHP class to analyze large XML files.

He includes an example XML file, the HTML output of the parsing and a sample of how to use the class to parse and output the XML structure, complete with some CSS.

On Dzone.com there's a book review from Ivan Ilijasic covering a recently released title from Packt Publishing, the "PHP Ajax Cookbook" (by Milan Sedliak, Rajesh Jeba R. Anbiah and Roshan Bhattarai). His review gives a "one minute bottom line" about the book and its contents.

I've been in PHP development for more than 10 years and this book is really useful material. I could recommend it to beginners and experienced developers. From my point of view, there are three types of developer books - complete byte-to-byte fat books, introduction books and cookbooks. I want my cookbook to have useful and simple to use recipes. This book fulfilled my expectations.

He mentions some of the topics that the book covers including javascript libraries and frameworks (mostly jQuery) and recipes for things like form validation, dynamic content, pagination and drag and drop functionality. He also points out some coverage of testing and debugging content as well as web service "mashups" and mobile app development.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing how to do some form validation using some basic PHP (no external libraries or tools here). This is a beginner level tutorial to help you get familiar with the concepts behind doing validation (and

In this article you'll construct and validate a simple form using HTML and PHP. The form is created using HTML and validation and processing of the form's contents is done with PHP. The goal is to teach you some basic HTML form elements and how their data is accessible to you in your PHP scripts.

They start with the form itself, a basic setup with various kinds of fields - text, select, radio and a checkbox. Both the HTML markup and the PHP to do the validation is included. They check for things like "not empty", "must select one" and optional fields. Be sure to read the comments for some good tips on filtering the form's input too.

In this new tutorial Smashing Magazine shows you how to create a mini "Christmas List" application with PHP, HTML and CSS (and a little bit of database help) to display a list of what you or your family wants this holiday.

'Tis the season to be jolly, and how much jollier could we make it than with a helpful Christmas wish list crafted for your family to ensure that you get maximum presentage this holiday? In this article, we will focus on creating a very simple system that allows you to add gift ideas to a Web page, and for your family (or whoever) to view the list.

They walk you through the setup of the basic PHP file structure, the HTML template for the list output, CSS to make it look nice and the actual PHP backend - working with a MySQL database to pull out product information and use a simple login method.

In a new tutorial from PHPMaster.com Jason Pasnikowski takes a look at sending emails with PHP - an introduction to what the language offers and how it can be used to send an HTML version.

In most cases your installation of PHP will be capable of sending emails. If you are using a shared host, or if you installed PHP using a package management system like apt-get, more than likely you're all set. You'll really only need to worry about extra configuration if you're compiling PHP from source or if you're running it on Windows. In either case, there are plenty of resources available online to help you out. Because that's all beyond the scope of this article, I'll assume you're set. If not, Google will be your friend.

He starts with a simple example using the mail function but quickly moves on to sending a multi-part email with an attached zip file and HTML content. He includes the all code you'll need and explains each part in detail so you'll know exactly what's going on.