Book Image

jQuery 1.3 with PHP

Book Image

jQuery 1.3 with PHP

Overview of this book

To make PHP applications that respond quickly, avoid unnecessary page reloads, and provide great user interfaces, often requires complex JavaScript techniques and even then, if you get that far, they might not even work across different browsers! With jQuery, you can use one of the most popular JavaScript libraries, forget about cross-browser issues, and simplify the creation of very powerful and responsive interfaces ñ all with the minimum of code. This is the first book in the market that will ease the server-side PHP coder into the client-side world of the popular jQuery JavaScript library. This book will show you how to use jQuery to enhance your PHP applications, with many examples using jQuery's user interface library jQuery UI, and other examples using popular jQuery plugins. It will help you to add exciting user interface features to liven up your PHP applications without having to become a master of client-side JavaScript. This book will teach you how to use jQuery to create some really stunning effects, but without you needing to have in-depth knowledge of how jQuery works. It provides you with everything you need to build practical user interfaces for everything from graphics manipulation to drag-and-drop to data searching, and much more. The book also provides practical demonstrations of PHP and jQuery and explains those examples, rather than starting from how JavaScript works and how it is different from PHP. By the end of this book, you should be able to take any PHP application you have written, and transform it into a responsive, user-friendly interface, with capabilities you would not have dreamed of being able to achieve, all in just a few lines of JavaScript.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
jQuery 1.3 with PHP
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Dynamic select boxes


Frequently on the Internet, you would have come across registration forms where selection of certain fields cause the entire page to refresh in order to show you the details specific to that selection.

An example of that would be countries and cities. It's a natural thing for a web developer to want a person to input the country and city with a select box instead of an input box. This is because cities and countries rarely change, and you really don't want your users making up countries or cities!

However, there are many thousands of cities when you consider the number of countries in the world, and to print them all in a simple registration form is extremely impractical, not to mention their sheer number, as we will see in a later chapter!

Earlier the developers would have come up with a solution like: to add an event watcher, wait for the Country select box to be changed, and when this happened, the entire "state" of the form would be sent to the server and a new page...