Andy Frey dropped us a line to tell us about a method he's come up with to make a remoting interface between Javascript and PHP5.

This is a demonstration of a very fast and easy way to build AJAX-type applications where communications between JavaScript on the client side and PHP5 on the server side is ideal. This library makes development of such systems fast and very simple.

In his example he shows how to create the PHP and Javascript functions that let the service talk back and forth. He defines a simple "Hello World" style application to show how it would be structured. He also includes a bit of more complex that has other functionality - getting a value out of an array and returning a property/private variable from the backend class.

Derick Rethans has posted his wrapup of this year's PHP Vikinger event held in Skien, Norway. Here's some of what happened during the one-day event:

PHP Vikinger is over again. With about 35 attendees, I would think it was a great success. After opening the event, we figured out which topics people were interested in. After voting for the topics, we came up with a nice couple of topics.

Topics included QA/Testing, web application deployment a look at PHP's document object model functionality and some presentations on Project Zero, the new PHP lexer, eZ Components and database abstraction.

Kae Verens has posted a review of another of Packt Publishing's PHP-related offerings, "Learning PHP Data Objects" by Dennis Popel (published in Aug 2007).

Learning PHP Data Objects, by Dennis Popel, is an introduction to PDO, which walks through the building of a believable test example - a library manager for your home library. [...] I really couldn't find very much about this book that I didn't like. Ignoring the appendices, the book is 154 pages purely devoted to teaching PDO through examples, including error handling, working with BLOBs, even the creation of the M in MVC (Models).

The review mentions Models, Active Record and how the book creates a Library manager application that includes the use of prepared statements and transactions.

Ken Guest has posted a review of yet another PHP-related book from APress publishing, "PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice (Second Edition)".

While being an easy read, this is a well written, serious book and is aimed squarely at enterprise-level developers and software engineers who make their living through the development and architecture of solutions developed in PHP.

He breaks down the book into the three sections its title mentions - working with objects, design patterns and a healthy dose of PEAR, phpDocumentor, PHPUnit, CVS and phing.