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 the IBuildings blog today, Sandy Pleyte has posted a look at using the ATK framework and what kind of effect its own recently added caching system (atkCache) has on its performance.

Now there is a cache object (atkCache) available in the ATK SVN trunk. The new atkCache class is a factory class, which builds and returns instances of atkCache which has all the methods to communicate with an external cache to handle the actual storage and retrieval.

It supports lots of different backend caching methods - APC, eAccelerator, the Zend Platform functionality, memcache, xcache and both file and variable caching.

He includes an example of its use - creating an object to cache to a file, configuring it with options like lifetime and path, and an example of its use (to cache a theme for a web page).

The DevX.com site has posted some code that gives you methods for passing information back and forth between PHP and a Flash application.

When you need to develop a web form with a special design and great effects, you will probably elect to use Flash. But building and programming Flash forms is considerably different from building standard HTML-based forms. [...] To do that though, you need to know how to access data in the Flash form and (sometimes) how to update the Flash form from PHP as well.

They help you build a sample Flash form as a base to work with in the transfer methods including the ActionScript to get the data out of each field. The tutorial shows the two way communication that's possible - pushing the Flash values out to the PHP script via a getURL() call and pulling the results back in with a call to loadVars() from the PHP script's output.

On the MSBWare.com site there's a new tutorial looking at the integration of the FCKeditor (a powerful web-based editor that works much like Word) with a MySQL database backend via PHP.

This article is intended to address the lack of documentation in integrating the FCKeditor with your MySQL database. Their tutorials show how to configure and use the editor, but how to get it to save to your database isn't addressed at all. While this article will utilize the MySQL DBMS, the concepts are the same for any DBMS.

They start with the download and install of the editor, including placing it in a page where it can be used (inclusion and configuration). The next step is to wrap the entire editor block in a form to make it submittable and, finally, write the update script to happen on submit. Complete code is included at the end of the tutorial.