Book Image

PHP jQuery Cookbook

By : Vijay Joshi
Book Image

PHP jQuery Cookbook

By: Vijay Joshi

Overview of this book

As web technology evolves, the gap between desktop applications and web applications continues to vanish. And what better way to bridge that gap, for your own website, than using the best two open source technologies in the market: PHP and jQuery. The power-combo of these two is leading the way in revolutionizing the RIA world. Although they are easy to integrate, finding or figuring out how to do what you want to do is rather arduous.The PHP jQuery Cookbook will be your handy guide with walkthroughs of common integration tasks and problems that will help you master the possibilities available using the PHP and jQuery combo. You will learn quick solutions to necessary tasks to integrate the power of two of the best known and most widely used web technologies of today – PHP on the server side and jQuery on the client side. Glide through the basics and move to advanced topics to create dynamic and interactive web applications with this book in hand.This book covers a wide array of technical aspects of creating an interactive website. Apart from basics of PHP and jQuery, you will go through advanced topics like creating plugins, validating controls, and useful utilities that you will be able to use as stand-alone tools. AJAX, the key technique of browser-server communication is covered in detail. You will also learn to use JSON, which is becoming preferred as a mode of data interchange over XML, both in web applications and web services.The book also covers database interaction, which is an important part of any dynamic web application. You will also gain expertise in debugging JavaScript with the help of useful tools that will save you hours of tedious manual debugging.Most importantly, by using jQuery and PHP together, you will be able to develop applications that are compatible with all major browsers, with no need to write code targeted at specific browsers!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
PHP jQuery Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Searching elements using XPath


XPath or the XML Path is used to navigate an XML document. It is basically a query language that provides a standard set of expressions and functions for traversing a document tree. XPath operates on a document tree and can be used for functions, such as searching, comparing, and so on in a document.

PHP has built-in support for using XPath. This recipe will explain some concepts of XPath and how they can be used to get information from XML.

Using the common.xml file we will write a simple example that will demonstrate the capabilities of XPath.

Getting ready

Like earlier recipes, create a separate folder named Recipe3 inside the Chapter3 directory.

How to do it...

  1. Create an HTML file and name it as index.html. Create four buttons that will be used to show different usage of XPath. Also, create an empty DIV element for displaying the result. Also, define some CSS in the <head> section for better display.

    <html>
      <head>
        <title>Using XPath...