One more PHP Abstract coming at you! In this episode I took Ed Finkler of Funkatron Productions aside while at php|tek in Chicago and got to talk with him briefly about his work on Spaz, one of the original twitter clients.

Not too long ago, it seemed like there was a pretty clear distinction between client-side technologies and server-side technologies. Languages like PHP, Perl and Python resided on the server, taking care of tasks like database connectivity, transaction management and remote procedure calls, while tools like JavaScript, CSS and HTML were used exclusively on the client to render pages, perform whizzy effects and respond to user events.

Things aren’t that clear any longer. Projects like Jaxer and Phobos are blurring these distinctions, by making it possible to run JavaScript on the server and use it for tasks ranging from server-side file access to input validation. And in this article, I’m going to show you how to add a JavaScript engine to your PHP build, with a little help from PECL’s SpiderMonkey extension. Keep reading!

Unless you’ve spent the past couple of years down a rabbit hole, you’ve already heard about AJAX: it’s a technique that combines asynchronous client-server communication with a set of existing toolkits (JavaScript, CSS, the DOM) to selectively update parts of a Web page, instead of the traditional “full page reload”. This produces applications that are quicker and more responsive to user input, resulting in a better user experience.

But what does all this have to do with PHP, you ask? Well, PHP is commonly used on the server end of the connection, to handle AJAX requests and send back responses. But that isn’t all it can do – with a little PEAR package called HTML_AJAX, you can use PHP to significantly simplify the work that goes into building and deploying an AJAX application.

That’s where this article comes in. Over the next few pages, I’m going to give you a quick run-down on the PEAR HTML_AJAX class, together with a few examples of how you can use it to AJAX-ify various Web applications. Keep reading, and be prepared to be amazed!

Roy Ganor has blogged about the integration between Zend Framework and Dojo. Take a look at the screencast, which demonstrates how these two toolkits can be used to quickly build a flexible and standards-compliant Web application. And if you're a Zend Studio for Eclipse user, the screencast also includes a neat overview of Zend Studio support for Dojo, including Dojo code widgets and themes, code assist and code navigation.

p. It’s not often that I review a book that is a year old for several reasons. The main reason is that technology changes so fast. In this day and age a book 12 months old usually contains out dated information. As with any good rule, there are exemptions, this book is one of them.

Kevin van Zonneveld has a great series of posts and JavaScript code snippets that give you JavaScript equivalents of some of his favorite PHP. The good news is there is some useful code here, the bad news is that the JavaScript code doesn’t support namespaces.

Flash and PHP are becoming a popular pair of technologies. It seems that every time I turn around, I’m seeing new Flash front-ends that are talking to PHP back-ends and doing some very interesting things. One of the most interesting things I’ve seen though has to be MyKleenexTissue.com. I was given the opportunity to sit down and talk with Andy Lintner, Director of Application Development, Jon Aniano, General Manager, and Jeff Kazmierski, President and Creative Director; all of Active Media Architects, the team behind MyKleenexTissue.com. Along the way we talked about the technology decisions they made, and the process they used for development.

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.