This post is geared towards folks who haven't done the "A" part of "AJAX" before (And I mean the first "A", as in "Asychronous"); are new to Yahoo's implementation of the XMLHttpRequest object (The Yahoo! Connection Manager) and would like added information on how that works; or both.

Sarah starts off slow with an example of making a connection to a backend PHP script as called by a HTML form. The simple example is fleshed out with a database backend (via PEAR::DB) and the Javascript to handle the response and the errors that might arise. Finally, a request can be made and the result eval-ed to give the client a nice, simple Javascript object to work with.

am proud to announce that jMaki now has a server runtime that fully supports jMaki for PHP 5. This is in addition to JSP, JSF, and Phobos.

The jMaki project is an Ajax framework that gives the developer some lightweight, reusable widgets either they can make or that can be inherited from something like the Dojo toolkit, Yahoo UI, Scriptaculous, and many other libraries. This new PHP integration makes it as easy as a simple PHP call to integrate it into your application.

Check out Greg's blog entry for more details and an example of how to use this new functionality.