Monday, 29 January 2007

Make Use of PHP with Microsoft AJAX Library

Steve Marx in a post over his blog gives information about his PHP related project called PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library, a small library to help PHP applications make use of the Microsoft AJAX Library. He also informs you that it’s a shared source project under the Microsoft Permissive License.

The Microsoft AJAX Library is a pure-JavaScript library used by ASP.NET AJAX but is also available as a separate download he informs. PHP for MS AJAX is code to help you make use of the Microsoft AJAX Library from PHP applications. With this first Alpha release, it supports exposing PHP classes as AJAX-enabled web services, just as in ASP.NET applications. In fact, the generated proxies are identical to what you get from ASP.NET, meaning you can have full interoperability he says. The same client-side code could connect to either an ASP.NET web service or a PHP service, he informs.

He provides a ‘Hello World’ code example from the PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library homepage to understand the AJAX web service calls in a simple way. He also informs you that you can pass more complex types than strings including PHP classes. This can be done if you click on the ‘1 Alpha’ release; you can download a full source distribution which includes a sample of passing full PHP objects back and forth.