p. Ok, so you’ve written a cool new Web API and you’ve written l33t JavaScript to call it from your page. The problem is, anybody who views your source can see how you call your new toy and use it for their own nefarious purposes. Granted, sometimes this is what you want but there are times when you want to keep your toys to yourself. For those times, here is a quick trick you can implement that will help thwart most evil doers.

p. Ok, there’s this small company named Yahoo, you may have heard of them. Anyhow, they are looking for a PHP developer. Click on inside for the details.

p. Creating a chat application is not a difficult task. Honest!

p. This tutorial is a step by step introduction to creating a lightweight chat application using XML as a storage medium. As personal motivation, I develop PHP games as a hobby. In pursuit of that hobby I’ve found that offering a flat threadless forum in such games tends to result in heavy usage as players attempt to use it as a chat room. The reason is that even with the advent of irc and instant messengers, users continue see an alternative web based solution as attractive for a number of reasons whether its limited access to instant messengers through a corporate proxy or simply for convenience sake.

The final part of our 7 part tutorial on creating an ajax chat system using MySQL and the Zend Framework.

p. Part 5 of our 7 part tutorial on creating an Ajax based Chat application.

p. In part 4 of this tutorial we take a look at adding a new MessageAction method to our current Controller. This will expect one piece of information: a new chat message.

Last week I attended the Web Builder 2.0 Conference in snazzy Las Vegas, Nevada. This year, the name of the game was ajax, Ajax, and AJAX Our beloved PHP had a decent representation throughout the various sessions, but no more than during my own "PHP Powers Mashups" talk. At the conference I bumped into PHP security guru and buddy Chris Shiflett, and met some new folks like Cal Henderson from Flickr and Ask Bjørn Hansen. Normally, you’ll find me working the Zend booth at this kind of conference, but this time I was free to attend sessions. I decided to post my notes on the most interesting things I saw at the conference, presented to you here list style.

This is part 6 of our 7 part tutorial on how to create an web based chat application using Ajax, MySQL and the Zend Framework.

p. As our chat application gathers pace we return to the server side of the application. At this point we have setup the Zend Framework with an IndexController class to handle server requests. After the initial loading of our HTML interface, we will expect all further server requests to be issued via AJAX (courtesy of Prototype and the XMLHttpRequest object) on the client side. We’ll see this in Part 5.

p. This weekend I found an interesting article over at anyexamples.com on using AJAX and PHP to do asynchronous file uploads. Click on inside and I’ll give you the details.