Nowadays, web applications are behaving more and more like desktop applications with lesser page loads and more user interaction and effects. The Web has become faster and applications such as Gmail and Facebook have given a new meaning to web applications.
PHP on the server side and jQuery on the client side (browser) are a killer combination for developing interactive web applications. PHP is the leading language of choice among web developers and jQuery is now used on more than one-third of the top 1000 sites on the internet and is the most widely-used library.
One thing that PHP and jQuery have in common is that they are easy to learn. Once you know the basics, you can promote yourself to the next level easily.
And this is what the book will do for you. It is like a toolbox having a myriad of tools inside. It will allow you to write faster web applications, which feel like desktop applications, with the help of PHP and jQuery. Whether you want to learn live validations, create plugins, drag elements, create a menu, watch videos using YouTube API, or interact with the database, just jump to the respective recipe for the solution. AJAX, a key feature of rich internet applications, is also covered in detail.
You are not required to read this book from the beginning to the end. Each recipe is independent and is like a "how to" or a mini application in itself. You can directly look for a solution to a specific problem.
I hope you will find this book useful and that it will help you to take your skills to a higher level.
Chapter 1, Handling Events with jQuery, helps you understand jQuery's cross-browser event handling methods. You will learn to work with keyboard and mouse events. Advance event handling topics, such as dragging and keyboard shortcuts are also discussed.
Chapter 2, Combining PHP and jQuery, lists several ways of sending AJAX requests using jQuery and also describes how PHP responds to such requests. This chapter also contains recipes that deal with caching of AJAX requests and error handling during AJAX requests.
Chapter 3, Working with XML Documents, explains working with XML files in PHP as well as jQuery. Recipes will describe how to read, write, and modify XMLs using DOM and SimpleXML extensions of PHP. Parsing XML with jQuery is also discussed.
Chapter 4, Working with JSON, discusses JSON in detail. You will be shown how to read and write JSON data in PHP, and also explore jQuery's inbuilt capabilities of parsing JSON.
Chapter 5, Working with Forms, deals with forms and form validations. You will learn how to validate forms for different types of data with jQuery. This will cover validating empty fields, numbers, e-mail addresses, web addresses, and much more. Server-side validation methods will also be discussed to make validations more powerful.
Chapter 6, Adding Visual Effects to Forms, extends the previous chapter and provides recipes for adding visual effects to forms. Recipes in this chapter allow you to create user-friendly forms by adding effects, such as highlighting, fading, expandable boxes, and various others.
Chapter 7, Creating Cool Navigation Menus, describes the creation of different types of menus, such as animated menus, accordions, and tabbed menus. Advanced techniques for creating tabs are also covered that will guide you in adding and removing tabs on the fly.
Chapter 8, Data Binding with PHP and jQuery, explains, in detail, how a database can be used along with PHP and jQuery. Examples included in this chapter will explain how to fetch data from the database and use it in web forms.
Chapter 9, Enhancing your Site with PHP and jQuery, teaches you some advanced techniques of PHP and jQuery. It will show how to overcome browser restrictions like cross-domain requests. You will learn to create a jQuery plugin for custom use and an endless scrolling page among other things.
Appendix, Firebug, explains the use of Firebug for debugging HTML and JavaScript in web pages. You will learn how to edit HTML and change the appearance of pages on the browser itself without switching to actual code files. You will be able to execute JavaScript directly from Firebug and further understand debugging JavaScript using this add-on.
You should have Apache (or another web server), PHP (version 5.0 or above), and MySQL installed on your system to be able to run the examples in this book. You can install them all at once using software such as WampServer or you can install them separately. jQuery (version 1.3.2 or higher) will also be required.
In terms of technical proficiency, this book assumes that you have working knowledge of PHP, jQuery, HTML, and CSS. You need to know only the basics of these, leave the rest to this book.
This book is for PHP and jQuery developers who just know the basics of these two and want to use PHP and jQuery together to create rich internet applications. It provides a large number of examples in each chapter that will take you from being a basic developer to a pro by giving step-by-step instructions for each task in developing web applications using PHP and jQuery.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The input button has also been attached to a click event."
A block of code is set as follows:
$('input:text').bind(
{
focus: function()
{
$(this).val('');
},
blur: function()
{
$(this).val('Enter some text');
}
});New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Now click on the Create New Element button a few times to create some DIV elements".
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