jQuery 1.3 with PHP

Chapter 1. Introduction and Overview

Welcome!

This book is a general overview of how to take advantage of jQuery's ease-of-use to make your PHP applications more "snappy" on the client side.

The book is aimed at the PHP developers who usually don't write client-side JavaScript, and would like an example-based introduction demonstrating a wide variety of integrations between server-side and client-side code.

For years, JavaScript (the language that jQuery is written in) has been seen as a "toy" language. However, the pervasiveness of Ajax has allowed it to break out of the client side and become an essential tool for all serious web application developers.

Ajax is a tool used by client-side code to contact the server and get or send data without needing to reload the entire page. It's used to update part of the page, or to retrieve data for a JavaScript application, or to send data to the server. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. However, the XML part is optional, and is often replaced with plain text or another data format such as JSON (explained later in this chapter).

This book will demonstrate how combining server-side PHP with client-side jQuery can make JavaScript much more useful than just for "form checking".

It is assumed that you are a server-side web application developer who wants to take a step into the client side and learn how to use JavaScript to make your applications more efficient and exciting for the client.

To be very clear about it, this book is not about PHP, and it is not about jQuery—it is about how to work with both PHP and jQuery. This book will teach you how to use jQuery to create some really cool effects, but without you needing to have in-depth knowledge of how jQuery works.

With this book, we are more interested in providing some practical demonstrations of PHP and jQuery with explanations, than in getting right down into the guts of how JavaScript works and how it is different from PHP.

After reading this book, you will have seen and built a wide variety of example applications. This would certainly be enough to immensely change how your current PHP applications work.

Each chapter in this book is dedicated to a specific subject, and will usually involve building a practical example, which you can use in your day-to-day work.

How does jQuery fit in with PHP?

Traditional network applications have both server and client side, each of which is a program in its own right.

As a very simple example, consider a networked game, where you are playing against a number of other people. The server holds a database of the present positions of everything, and decides if something is allowed or not. On each player's computer, there is a client, which gets data from the server and displays it in a user-friendly way, such as rendering a 3D world that you can move around in. The client is smart enough that if you try to do something that is obviously not allowed, such as run through a wall, then it won't let you.

It would be silly if a 3D screen was generated on the server and was sent to the client 24 times per second. And it would be awkward if you tried to do something like walk through a wall, and had to wait for the server to decide if it was allowed or not.

However, in a pure PHP environment, that's exactly what has been happening—the server generates absolutely everything that the client displays. If an element needs to be removed from a table, for example, then the server needs to be told, so that it can give the client the new view. If you try to do something illegal, such as submit a blank form where an email address is required, then pure PHP applications will let you do that, wasting time and server resources.

However, using JavaScript, and especially using Ajax, the client side is no longer a "dumb terminal" for the server. We can write applications fully on the client side, if we wish, using the server purely as a database. This book will demonstrate ways to work towards that.

Although Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, it's a misnomer. This is because in most cases, no XML is involved (either plain HTML or data in JSON format is usually used). Ajax allows a client to open a data channel between itself and the server, allowing JavaScript to load new information from the server without needing to refresh the entire screen.

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It is a simple data storage format, which can be used to transfer information about strings, numbers, arrays, and associative arrays between various languages. It is much smaller than XML, and is much easier to transform because there is a direct relationship between the text format and the internal data format. It can be used in both PHP and JavaScript. It's based on how JavaScript is actually written, so it can be natively compiled into an object in JavaScript.

In JavaScript, you can create an actual data object from JSON by simply "eval"ing it (or using the new json.decode function in newer browsers). In PHP, you can use the json_decode and json_encode functions to convert from and to JSON.

With Ajax, we can provide a client-side experience, which had only been possible beforehand using external plugins, such as Java or Flash. It could not safely be assumed that these plugins were available on the client. Every major browser now supports Ajax, so there are much fewer reasons to rely on proprietary technology these days.

jQuery simplifies Ajax. With pure Ajax, you need to do low-level stuff like create an XMLHTTPRequest object (taking care of cross-browser incompatibilities), set callbacks, check response values, and so on. With jQuery, all you need to do is use $.get or one of the other jQuery JSON functions. These functions will take care of the low-level stuff for you.

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Frank Stepanski Jan 11, 2010

jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries on the web right now, and it can used for many situations in web design and development. One of the most used sever-side languages on the web is PHP and uysing jQuery and PHP together is a great combination as the author Kae Verens demonstrates in this great book.The author does an excellent job of explaining some of the cool things like the many plugins that are available for creating things as inteactive select boxes, tabs, accordians and how ot integrate these plugin scripts within your PHP code with real-life examples.Other topics covered by the author are file management, image manipulation, calendars, and drag and drop manipulation. There are lots of examples and code snipets that are used which helps the reader learn everything ste-by-step.The book is geared towards the beginner to intermediate PHP programmer as well as the would-be programmer who is a client-side designer with some JavaScript experience.I highly recommed this book to anybody who wants learn how to integrate some cool effects and commercial interactivity to their websites.A great book!

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Amazon Customer Jun 28, 2010

The book states that it is for PHP developers. Yes it is good for PHP develpers but it is exceptional, in my opinion for nearly-newbies to PHP and jQuery alike.Yes there is some technical stuff in there but the examples are so clear (and copy-pastable) that I as somebody without jQuery or PHP expertise was successfull with the examples.Chapters 3 and 8 are worth the cost of the book alone. Creating cool dynamic tabs and accordions was a breeze and dragging and dropping page elements slightly more challenging but still achieveable for a determined novice.Yes good book.

Dan Wellman Feb 04, 2010

jQuery 1.3 with PHP by Kae Varens is a great book that shows you how to interface jQuery with PHP. It's different from any other web development book I've read because it approaches things from the opposite perspective that I personally am used to - from the server to the client. It's aimed at competent PHP developers that want to learn how to use jQuery. Strictly speaking I'm outside of the scope of who the book is aimed at, but fortunately I knew just enough PHP to follow along with the examples and know roughly what is happening in the server-side code. It is made clear very early on who the book is aimed at.One thing that I really liked about this book was that as well as the strong focus on jQuery throughout (as you'd expect) the author also included not just one, but several different examples of using jQuery UI in conjunction with PHP. jQuery UI is the official UI library for jQuery so I think it's important that it should be covered in this kind of book.Overall this is a great book with very thorough and well-explained examples and plenty of code that the average server-side developer could take away and reuse. I would certainly recommend it for server-side developers with little knowledge of JavaScript.

Mario Rimann Feb 24, 2010

Kae Verens put together a long list of cool ideas what can be accomplished by jQuery and PHP. I was surprised that stuff like the form-validation can be configured in one place and used both on the frontend with jQuery and serverside with PHP. Also the addon to create a fully features calendar was awesome!The book is written as a cook-book and features many walk-trough solutions for common issues. If you're looking for a full reference of jQuery, that's not the right book for you. But if you're looking for solutions and inspiration, grab that book!

Cody Lindley Dec 15, 2009

I have to admit that when I picked this book up I was hoping to learn a thing or two about php. However, after a careful read of the book's description any disappoint I felt was my own fault, as the author is very clear about the book's intentions. It's clear the author intended this book for readers who have already mastered php and are seeking additional knowledge about JavaScript/jQuery.So, if you are a php developer who has never bothered to look over the fence at client-side coding practices, this book is ideally for you. If you are a JavaScript developer looking to learn a thing or two about PHP you might be frustrated as the author assumes you are already "good" at php development. Because of this assumption made by the author, very little insight into the php code is given. But, to the author's credit, he warns us about this fact upfront.Regardless of your knowledge of php or JavaScript/jQuery, this book does an excellent job at presenting many of the patterns and concepts centered around using AJAX and UI patterns to eliminate complete page reloads. I enjoyed the coded examples in spirit more than I enjoyed reading the code. While the JavaScript code gets the job done, I found the use of the custom DOM ready event to be unnecessary, as well as the organization of functions in the global window scope to be a bit dangerous. On the positive side, I did get the impression that the author understood jQuery completely and utilized the library efficiently and effectively.In my opinion, this is a great book for a very specific type of reader. And that reader would be a php developer who is disconnected to what's been going on with JavaScript and client-side coding paradigms common in today's web development world.

jQuery 1.3 with PHP: Enhance your PHP applications by increasing their responsiveness through jQuery and its plugins

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