On the CSS Tricks blog there's a recent article showing how to combine the jQuery Javascript library and the SimplePie PHP feed aggregator to create a iPhone/mobile interface to any RSS feed.

We are going to create a web page that is formatted specifically for the iPhone (but would presumably be good for other mobile devices as well). This web page will dynamically fill itself with content from any RSS feed that you give it. The interface is going to be built to be easy to use on a mobile device, with large "touchable" areas and nice (jQuery) animations that whisk you between articles.

They work through the process - five simple steps:

• Create the iPhone Environment
• Pull in the RSS Feed
• Creating the Front Page: Headlines Only
• Creating the Article Pages: jQuery Slider Style
• Adding Some Flair

All code and images needed are included (as well as a demo if you'd like to try it out).

On the ProDevTips blog, there's a quick post with an example of a Zend Framework/jQuery and Smarty combination he came across while working up a CMS system:

The result is an interface where an administrator can settle money transfers. It will start with displaying a list of all requested transfers, when the administrator has manually finished transferring cash to each recipient's account he can use this interface to update the database.

He briefly explains the code, a combination of a jQuery function run on page load, a Smarty template for each transfer's information and the backend code through the Zend Framework to handle the requests issued from the button click.

Felix Geisendorfer has posted his slides from his presentation at this year's CakeFest covering the powerful combination of jQuery and the CakePHP framework.

Sorry this took so long, but here you can download the PDF or the much better Keynote version of my slides.

He also has an embedded Slideshare player on the post of you want to check out the presentation without the download.

In response to Travis Swicegood's post about fluent APIs, Alex Netkachov has added some of his own examples to the topic from the Zend Framework and the popular Javascript library, jQuery.

In his recent post Travis Swicegood is talking about the "Fluent API". This kind of API is very popular in scripting languages and I use it during my work with Zend Framework or jQuery projects. Another good example of such technique is Document Object Model API.

His examples show the method chaining that's the hallmark of fluent interfaces. Unfortunately, there's no good way to just make an object and call a fluent interface on it in PHP, so Alex suggests a simple little wrapper (that just returns the object) to make it easier.

From the SEO Expert Blog, there's a new tutorial focusing on making "Amazon ads that rock" by combining jQuery and PHP.

Are you sick of annoying ads that take up large parts of the screen, pop up, under or anywhere else, move around, blink and flash? You want to learn how to create ads that rock with a few lines of simple JavaScript and PHP code? Then let me show you how.

He shows his method for the creation of his unobtrusive ads with the advertising content that Amazon has to offer. The process is broken up into four steps:

• The Data Structure - an array of arrays with the Amazon information for the items (in this case books)
• Converting the PHP Array to JavaScript - using a Drupal module to assign the PHP array to a Javascript variable
• The HTML Output - a function that outputs a "block" of ads
• The JavaScript - the jQuery Javascript code to handle the clicks on each of the links.

You can see it in action at the top of the right sidebar on the SEO Expert website.

A new project has been pointed out to us today - phpQuery, a port of jQuery to PHP:

phpQuery is PHP-port of well known and great web2.0 JS library, which jQuery is. It's not something like JQPie, which is form of JS code generator and server-client layer.

They include a short example of adding content to a page (a new list element) that uses the DOM extension in PHP5 to make the action happen. You can check out the library as a part of their plainTemplate package.

In a new tutorial on O'Reilly's ONLamp.com website today, Bill Lubanovic shows an example of moving a normal web-based PHP application over to a more Ajax-enabled environment.

In the web environment, we've typically needed hacks like populating hidden fields in a form, and regenerating the whole page, even for a tiny change. Can we make the process more rational?

This article describes a makeover of a typical database-backed web form. We'll show some old code â€" a mixture of HTML, JavaScript, and PHP â€" and rebuild it with modern web techniques like Ajax, and modern tools like jQuery.

In their example, they show how to take a simple form element, a select box of names, and modify it to work with an Ajax connection. Instead of having to submit the information back to to the PHP script with a form submit button, they can make a request when the user changes the select option to get that person's information. They've included all of the relevant code and some great explanation to help you recreate the example and move on to work up your own.

Richard Thomas reports on the latest functionality to be implemented with his jQPie framework - Ext support.

I had planned on building some extra functionality into jQPie to fit certain needs but after playing with Ext and its jQuery support all my needs have been met. A basic example of the paging/data grid module running off php, works pretty nice. http://projects.cyberlot.net/jqpie/examples/paging.html

The jQPie project provides a lightweight interface to iQuery. Check out some examples of what it can do on its wiki page.

David Coallier points out a new feature of the main PEAR website (http://pear.php.net) - integration of the jQuery framework to help with the administration of a recent addition to the site, user comments.

http://pear.php.net is now using jQuery for some sections of the administration area in order to view user notes/comments and that I will be starting implementing more sections over the site within the next few weeks (Of course this will all be done once we have split the code completely into templates, views, controllers, MDB2 move, etc)

He also makes some comments about the number of Javascript frameworks out there and a mention of the roadmap for the rest of the features they plan to add to the PEAR site.

Richard Thomas has officially released his first version of his jQPie software he's been developing.

Svn code had some issues in IE, this has been cleared up. New dynamic table sorter added and overall code cleaned up. Table sorter was redone from the ground up and is now a complete rewrite from my original demo code I used as the base.

He's looking for other developers out there that are interested in making the port of the PHP part to other languages (the "slices of pie" to make it portable). If you're interested, go grab the latest version from his SVN repository.