From our sister site, AjaxDeveloper.org today, there's this new post with an article from PHPit.net about using Ajax and PHP without the use of that pesky XMLHttpRequest object.

Ajax is one of the biggest 'discoveries' in the past year, and it has become a real buzzword, just like Web 2.0. Admittedly, Ajax can be used for a lot of things, and it really does speed up web applications.

But there is one problem with most of the current implementations of Ajax: it has one dependency, and that is the XmlHttpRequest object. [...] In this tutorial, I will show you how to use Ajax without even having to use the XmlHttpRequest object.

He starts off with a pretty basic introduction and shows you how to get the data into the current page (through the use of some PHP outputting Javascript). Then, with the help of pseudo-ajax functionality, it can poll this data to present dynamic information to the user of the site...