If you’re a PHP developer, you enjoy many benefits: PHP is object-oriented; PHP applications deploy easily; and the PHP community at-large produces a vast array of classes, libraries, and tools that ease and facilitate coding.
But PHP applications (as well as applications constructed in all other Web programming languages, including Perl, Python, and Java) decidedly lack interactivity. For example, even the simple task of completing a wizard-like Web interface, say, to purchase an item from an online store, requires many round-trips to the server. Fetching each form in the series requires a round-trip, as does each step of validation. And while Web surfers have come to expect such page refreshes and delays in Web applications, the end-result is the nonetheless unsatisfying: the user experience of the Web is typically inferior to what can be done on the desktop.
Or was inferior. Now many parts of the Web look, feel, and act like shrinkwrapped software. The sea change? A variety of techniques and technologies. But which is the right one?
In the past year or so, JavaScript and XML, the so-called “AJAX,” have improved the interactivity of Web applications. However, AJAX is not a panacea. Browsers remain inconsistent, translating to a herculean effort to validate an application. It’s common to find a morass of HTML and JavaScript exceptions for Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, and Safari, just to name a few of the divergent browsers.
AJAX security is also an issue. The article “JavaScript…
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