AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications: Enhance the User Experience of Your PHP Website Using AJAX with This Practical Tutorial Featuring Detailed Case Studies

Assuming a basic knowledge of PHP, XML, JavaScript and MySQL, this book will help you understand how the heart of AJAX beats and how the constituent technologies work together. After teaching the foundations, the book will walk you through numerous real-world case studies covering tasks you’ll be likely to need for your own applications:

• Server-enabled form-validation page
• Online chat collaboration tool
• Customized type-ahead text entry solution
• Real-time charting using SVG
• Database-enabled, editable and customizable data grid
• RSS aggregator application
• A server-managed sortable list with drag&drop support using the script.aculo.us JavaScript toolkit

The appendices guide you through installing your working environment, using powerful tools that enable debugging, improving, and profiling your code, working with XSLT and XPath.

About the Authors

Cristian Darie is a software engineer with experience in a wide range of modern technologies, and the author of numerous technical books, including the popular Beginning E-Commerce series. Having worked with computers since he was old enough to press the keyboard, he initially tasted programming success with a first prize in his first programming contest at the age of 12. From there, Cristian moved on to many other similar achievements, and now he is studying distributed application architectures for his PhD degree.

Bogdan Brinzarea has a strong background in Computer Science holding a Master and Bachelor Degree at the Automatic Control and Computers Faculty of the Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania and also an Auditor diploma at the Computer Science department at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France.

His main interests cover a wide area from embedded programming, distributed and mobile computing, and new web technologies. Currently, he is employed as an Alternative Channels Specialist at Banca Romaneasca, Member of National Bank of Greece, where he is responsible for the Internet Banking project and coordinates other projects related to security applications and new technologies to be implemented in the banking area.

Filip Cherecheº-Toºa is a web developer with a firm belief in the future of web-based software. He started his career at the age of 9, when he first got a Commodore 64 with tape-drive.

Back home in Romania, Filip runs a web development company named eXigo, which is actively involved in web-based application development and web design. He is currently a student at the University of Oradea, studying Computer Science, and also an active member of the Romanian PHP Community.

Mihai Bucica started programming and competing in programming contests (winning many of them), all at age twelve. With a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Automatic Control and Computers Faculty of the Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania, Bucica works on building communication software with various electronic markets.

Even after working with a multitude of languages and technologies, Bucica's programming language of choice remains C++, and he loves the LGPL word. Mihai also co-authored Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce.