Christopher Jones has a quick post pointing out a new PHP and Oracle-related book from McGraw-Hill (written by Lee Barney and Michael McLaughlin covering web development with Oracle, PHP and Ajax:

The prolific Michael McLauglin just sent me a copy of his other new book "Oracle Database AJAX & PHP Web Application Development", co-written with Lee Barney.

The book looks at how to build "faster, lighter and more responsive Web applications while reducing code support and creation time". There's chapters on scalability, the basics of Ajax, PDO and multimodel communications.

PHPBuilder.com has continued their series looking at building an Ajax-driven shopping cart with part two posted today (part one here). Last time they laid the PHP foundation for the example app, this time they add another layer - the Ajax functionality to manage the current contents of the cart.

Finally, a link to the shopping cart is provided, although you could just as easily have displayed the cart contents on the same page. For the sake of brevity I'll just show you how to integrate the add feature, and will leave the subtraction mechanism to you as an exercise.

The Ajax frontend calls a managecart.php backend file that calls addToCart and deleteFromCart based on which type of "task" is passed to it.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial posted showing how to combine the Javascript power of Prototype along side PHP's adaptability to create a simple, ajax-driven shopping cart for your site.

In the latest installment of this ongoing PHP series, I'll show you how to build a shopping cart using PHP, session handling, and the Prototype JavaScript library. The cart allows users to add and delete products from the cart, as well as change cart quantities. And of course, the interaction is seemingly instantaneous, allowing for the user to continue shopping without waiting for the page to reload.

They start from the ground up - making the database tables, inserting some data - before writing up the simple PHP class with methods like deleteFromCart and getCart. This lays the foundation for the next article in the series where they add in a splash of ajax to make it a bit more user-friendly.

This new post from Jon Lebensold (on the KillerPHP blog) introduces you to a handy feature of the Zend Framework - View Helpers.

In summary, View Helpers are great for encapsulating forms, grids and other functionality that could eventually be bound to a different data source or even be pushed back to the user through a simple AJAX call.

Example code on how to use them is included showing a sample helper that adds Ajax functionality to a form's submit and pushes the response values back out into a div on the page.