Do you know that
XMLHttpRequest is an API that can be used by JavaScript, JScript, VBScript and other web browser scripting languages to transfer and manipulate XML data to and from a web server using HTTP, establishing an independent connection channel between a web page's Client-Side and Server-Side.
The data returned from XMLHttpRequest calls will often be provided by back-end databases. Besides XML, XMLHttpRequest can be used to fetch data in other formats, e.g. JSON or even plain text.
Also interesting
Ajax Frameworks
How to use AJAX in your applications
Read our review of all AJAX PHP frameworks:
Thorough review of AJAX frameworks for PHP, part I
Some unsorted materials
new! iBox (www, demo, zip)
Lightweight script that lets you overlay images, divs, and HTML on your current page. It is damn easy to install and setup.
AJASON (www, zip, demo)
PHP based framework. It uses JSON (Javascript Object Notation) to encode/decode data between server and browser; so it isn't full AJAX (it doesn't use XML). Open-source license by multiple contributors.
AjaxAC (www, zip, demo)
Encapsulates the entire application in a single PHP class.
- All application code is self-contained in a single class (plus any additional JavaScript libraries)
- Calling PHP file / HTML page is very clean. All that is required is creating of the application class, then referencing the application JavaScript and attaching any required HTML elements to the application.
- Built in functionality for easily handling JavaScript events
- Built in functionality for creating subrequests and handling them
- Allows for custom configuration values, so certain elements can be set at run time
- No messy JavaScript code clogging up the calling HTML code - all events are dynamically attached
- Easy to integrate with templating engine due to above 2 reasons
- Easy to hook in to existing PHP classes or MySQL database for returning data from subrequests
- Extensible widget structure to be able to easily create further JavaScript objects (this needs a bit of work though)