Joshua Eichorn mentions today about the "digital shortcut" created for his upcoming book "Understanding Ajax" from Prentice Hall.

A chapter from my book, Understanding AJAX has been made available as a digital shortcut. This chapter covers the different ways you can use the data you transfer using XMLHttpRequest.

Document centric approaches based on HTML and XML are described as well as various RPC approaches are shown.

The shortcut focuses on consuming data sent back in an XML or JSON format (and costs $9.99 USD). Joshua notes that he, personally, tends more towards "JSON based RPC approaches or HTML document based approaches" for his communication method. He also mentions client-side XSLT as an alternative to having to parse through and style the large amounts of data returned.

Got bored tonight, so I wrote an RPC library for PHP5. Going to need some RPC at work soon between two web servers, so instead of doing the sensible thing and using an available XMLRPC library or something similar, I naturally wrote my own. Besides, the recent(ish) serious vulnerabilities in the PEAR XMLRPC library make me hesitant to use it.

He includes a basic implementation of the script (to make a call to get the latest UNIX timestamp), with both the code for the client and server sides.