Andy Frey dropped us a line to tell us about a method he's come up with to make a remoting interface between Javascript and PHP5.

This is a demonstration of a very fast and easy way to build AJAX-type applications where communications between JavaScript on the client side and PHP5 on the server side is ideal. This library makes development of such systems fast and very simple.

In his example he shows how to create the PHP and Javascript functions that let the service talk back and forth. He defines a simple "Hello World" style application to show how it would be structured. He also includes a bit of more complex that has other functionality - getting a value out of an array and returning a property/private variable from the backend class.

Zend will be hosting a webinar this morning for all those interesting in hearing about the new partnership between them and the Dojo framework to bring fully-developed javascript functionality to the Zend Framework.

Zend is excited to announce a partnership between Dojo and Zend Framework. The goal is to deliver a one-stop solution for building rich internet applications with PHP & Ajax. Zend’s co-founder and chief technical officer Andi Gutmans discusses this announcement in-depth on his blog and Zend architect Matthew Weier O’Phinney also provides code samples and more details in a separate post.

The webinar will provide an overview of the integration that's going to happen and a bit of Q&A from those listening in. The event will be happening at 9am PDT/4pm GMT and you'll need to register to save your spot and get in.

In his keynote this morning Andi Gutmans announced some other big news (see here for the other announcement) at the php|tek conference currently being held in Chicago - that Zend and the Dojo framework were teaming up to provide an "out-of-the-box" Ajax solution included with the Zend Framework.

Several members of the community have already blogged about it including:

• Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Andi himself
• Wolfram Kriesing
• this FAQ from the Zend Developer Zone detailing the partnership

So far, all of the comments have been good and the partnership has been well received. Matthew included in hist post a few of the places they're already planning on "ajaxing" in the Zend Framework (including the forms and the JSON-RPC server).

In a new post today, Kae Verens takes a look at a method for easy and quick javascript minification with help from a little bit of PHP.

A useful part of minification is that during the act of compiling your minified source, you can also pull in other JavaScript files and compiled them all into one single source. This has a major advantage that there is only one file to download.

The method runs a file_get_contents on each of the javascript files, and pulls their content into a single PHP variable. This value is then just echoed out after it's passes through this minimizer class.

Kae also offers an alternative to performing this expensive operation each time - caching then checking the md5 hash of the cache to see if it's different than the current version. Example code is included.

Eirik Hoem has pointed out an online tool a coworker shared with him to work with regular expressions for multiple languages.

A coworker of mine has been working on a ajax enabled regex tool which lets you evaluate regex expressions in several languages (including PHP PCRE and PHP POSIX) with instant results.

The tool lets you put in the string you want to match again and the pattern you want to match with. The results are automatically populated below it, making it easy to fine-tune your expression to only what you want.

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.

In a new blog post, Chris Hartjes asks what's the next stack coming up on the horizon. LAMP has been the king for so long now it's hard to think about what might be next, but he takes a stab at it:

So the next thing I've been wondering about is about what future PHP stacks will look like, at least on the open source side of things. Have we gotten to the point where this is as good as it gets?

He looks at other stacks he's been working with (like LNNP - Linux, nginx, Postgres and PHP) as well as the question of limitations. Are we limiting ourselves by relying on LAMP too much? What else is out there? Does Javascript have a permenant place in any of this? (jLAMP anyone?)

As both the Zend Developer Zone and Ajaxian point out, there's been two new projects based on the Ext JS user interface widget system adapted for PHP - PHP-Ext and ExtPHP.

PHP-Ext is an open source widget library written for PHP 4 and 5 to empower the UI Layer. It is based on Ext JS javascript widgets which provide a standard and powerful API to build Rich Internet Applications. It basically works as a convenient wrapper for the Ext JS Javascript Objects.

And from the ExtPHP site:

I needed to be the one person who would have to wrestle JavaScript when problems happened. I therefore needed a way to insulate them from the gory details, which is why I created ExtPHP. As you may have guessed from subtle hints, such as this entry's 12-feet tall header, ExtPHP creates a PHP wrapper for ExtJS.

The Ajaxian post also includes code examples for each of them, one showing form construction and the other a tabbed interface.

In a new post to his blog today, Stoyan Stefanov has a proposal to being something PHP users are very used to - superglobals - over to Javascript.

Javascript has implied globals. When you skip the var in var a = 1; and go a = 1;, then a becomes a global variable. Some consider this an error in the language. [...] In PHP on the other hand, variables are local. [...] So how about this: adopt the $GLOBALS convention in your JavaScripts?

His example proposes the creation of a GLOBALS object you can assign properties to that can be used anywhere. This helps to keep the variables you truely want to be global contained, though it doesn't do much except provide a convention.