As you can see in the sidebar at left, one of the current projects I’m working on is xajax, an open source PHP library that helps developers write Web sites using AJAX. What makes it special? It allows you to call PHP functions directly from Javascript using an XML-based “bridge”, and then allows you to construct a series of response commands using a simple object API.

xajax was created by J. Max Wilson, and he is still involved in the development of xajax, so I can’t claim anything special about it just yet. The short version of the story is that I contacted him a couple of months ago asking if I could contribute to its development. He had been very busy as of late and was unable to devote much time to it, so after a while I volunteered to take a more active role on the project. He agreed, and here we are. I set up a new forums site right away, and that’s been going like gangbusters, so I’m very excited about the future of the project.

The next release is coming soon, and will feature some great new, uh, features. I’ll be talking about them and xajax in general over the next couple of weeks. Check back soon to see how it’s going.

PHP is great. I know it gets banged a lot by almost everyone, especially certain folks using THAT framework (you know who you are ), but it’s all good. My opinion of programming is that it never hurts to have a sense of humor about what you’re doing. Geeks that take themselves too seriously miss out on half of the fun. Face it, it’s danged difficult and a lot of work sometimes to craft quality, elegant software. But when you see that new code performing well and enabling exciting new functionality, it’s a feeling unlike anything else. And that’s true no matter what language you use.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2005 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Nitty-Gritty Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.