Submission + - Web-application development with PHP and AJAX
Eater writes: "Understanding AJAX is intended for developers who are already familiar with PHP and JavaScript development. It presents AJAX as a tool for adding responsive and flexible improvements to existing applications, as well as designing new AJAX applications from scratch. The author of the book, Josh Eichorn, is an active PHP/AJAX developer who maintains the PEAR HTML_AJAX library and is also the creator of phpDocumentor.
The book is organized into two sections. The first section begins with a brief history of AJAX, and moves on to explain the concept of "Rich Internet Application" as bridging the usability gap between native applications and typical Internet applications. This is a succinct and elegant way of demystifying the oft-buzzed concept of "Web 2.0".
Cross-browser development is well addressed early in the first section. An analysis of the JavaScript XMLHttpClient request is given early on, and a robust way of implementing this across common browsers is explained in detail. Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers are the main focus, although attention is given to Opera and Safari as well. A strategy for falling back to IFrames for asynchronous requests by older browsers is detailed to provide seamless support for the majority of users.
The concepts of Document Object Model (DOM), Single Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and XML-RPC are covered in chapter three, "Consuming the Sent Data". Document-centric and remote procedure call approaches are detailed, contrasted, and illustrated with frequent code examples.
Perhaps the most practical aspect of this book is the emphasis on integrating AJAX into an existing development cycle. This book doesn't make the mistake of adopting AJAX just for the sake of it being a cool technology. Sensible recommendations are given so the reader may objectively weigh the pros and cons off incorporating AJAX into a user interface, and strategies for overcoming common obstacles of AJAX adoption are well-defined.
The remaining material presented in section one covers debugging, gathering metrics for measuring improvements, and a specific set of criteria for user interface guidelines.
The second section of the book begins with three AJAX libraries: Sarissa, scriptaculous, and the PEAR HTML_AJAX (the author is also the developer for this last one.) The first two are JavaScript libraries, while the third is a PHP-centric library. Perhaps the only major drawback of this book is poor coverage of non-PHP development (although this is explicitly stated as a non-goal from the beginning.) While the Sarissa, scriptaculous, and HTML_AJAX libraries are covered in detail, a short round-up of other AJAX libraries is given in the appendices.
The second section (and thus, the book) concludes with a comprehensive use-case for the technologies explained previously. For a real-word example, a trouble-ticket application is given, the design goals of which are discussed in detail, and the reader is led through a list of examples for creating it from start to finish. The advantages of using AJAX for this example are well explored and evaluated at the culmination of the exercise.
To summarize, this book is a very practical and thorough explanation of AJAX development. I found the author's objective approach, with user-facing end results as the primary metric for success, was both informative and pragmatic."
The book is organized into two sections. The first section begins with a brief history of AJAX, and moves on to explain the concept of "Rich Internet Application" as bridging the usability gap between native applications and typical Internet applications. This is a succinct and elegant way of demystifying the oft-buzzed concept of "Web 2.0".
Cross-browser development is well addressed early in the first section. An analysis of the JavaScript XMLHttpClient request is given early on, and a robust way of implementing this across common browsers is explained in detail. Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers are the main focus, although attention is given to Opera and Safari as well. A strategy for falling back to IFrames for asynchronous requests by older browsers is detailed to provide seamless support for the majority of users.
The concepts of Document Object Model (DOM), Single Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and XML-RPC are covered in chapter three, "Consuming the Sent Data". Document-centric and remote procedure call approaches are detailed, contrasted, and illustrated with frequent code examples.
Perhaps the most practical aspect of this book is the emphasis on integrating AJAX into an existing development cycle. This book doesn't make the mistake of adopting AJAX just for the sake of it being a cool technology. Sensible recommendations are given so the reader may objectively weigh the pros and cons off incorporating AJAX into a user interface, and strategies for overcoming common obstacles of AJAX adoption are well-defined.
The remaining material presented in section one covers debugging, gathering metrics for measuring improvements, and a specific set of criteria for user interface guidelines.
The second section of the book begins with three AJAX libraries: Sarissa, scriptaculous, and the PEAR HTML_AJAX (the author is also the developer for this last one.) The first two are JavaScript libraries, while the third is a PHP-centric library. Perhaps the only major drawback of this book is poor coverage of non-PHP development (although this is explicitly stated as a non-goal from the beginning.) While the Sarissa, scriptaculous, and HTML_AJAX libraries are covered in detail, a short round-up of other AJAX libraries is given in the appendices.
The second section (and thus, the book) concludes with a comprehensive use-case for the technologies explained previously. For a real-word example, a trouble-ticket application is given, the design goals of which are discussed in detail, and the reader is led through a list of examples for creating it from start to finish. The advantages of using AJAX for this example are well explored and evaluated at the culmination of the exercise.
To summarize, this book is a very practical and thorough explanation of AJAX development. I found the author's objective approach, with user-facing end results as the primary metric for success, was both informative and pragmatic."
