Hey folks, I’m back! After being gone for a few weeks due to a family emergency, I’m now ready and rarin’ to go. First on the agenda: getting Willowgarden Developer Preview 2 out the door! The first step in that direction is adding the code to a Subversion repository, and to that end I’ve put Willowgarden up as a project at Sourceforge.net.

So, the good news: the codebase for DP2 is now available via SVN and is roughly 95% complete! Yay! The bad news is that it’ll be probably another week at least before I’ve worked enough on documentation, sample code, tutorials, etc. to feel comfortable building an official DP2 release. But if you like to be on the bleeding edge of tech, by all means go ahead with the SVN code. Please note: you’ll need to read this post at the Willowgarden forums in order to set your environment up correctly.

In other news, xajax 0.5 is still on the table, and I’m hoping we can get a beta release out by late September. Keep your fingers crossed! Much more news on that to come in the days ahead.

Thanks for your patience, and I’ll see you again here very soon!

Hey everyone! I’ve started a new video blog to be an adjunct to The Idea Basket, so sometimes when I feel like doing something more fun than typing on a keyboard, I’ll post a new video episode instead. You can watch the video on the jump, or visit this page at YouTube. This short introduction just gives you a basic run-down of the upcoming upgrades to xajax and Willowgarden.
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Hey, I was recently interviewed by Hatem Ben Yacoub at the online AJAX Magazine, so you might want to check that out if you’d like to hear me talk more about xajax and Willowgarden. Thanks Hatem!

Hey folks, if you’re developing Web apps with PHP (4.3+ or 5+) and have been wondering how to take full advantage of all that Ajax has to offer, you owe it to yourself to check out xajax! 0.2.4 started out as a quick big-fix update and ended up containing a few really neat new feature that will make your life easier, the biggest of which is the new addScriptCall command for the response object. Now you can call functions in your client scripts (or other Javascript functions/objects including script.aculo.us effects!) using a simple PHP method that automatically converts your PHP data structures to Javascript data structures. No, it’s not using JSON, but a simple XML format we were already using for passing Javascript data structures to PHP. One cool thing about this is that I didn’t write the bulk of the code for this feature — it was submitted as a patch by Luis Fagundes to Sourceforge and our community forums. Open source in action! I love it!

So be sure to check out xajax and let us know how you like it!

Hey everyone, it’s April and raining where I am (in “sunny” California). Actually, a couple of hours ago the weather cleared up and now it’s quite lovely. Mmmm, nothing like the smell of recent rain in the garden when the sun’s come out.

Anyway, you don’t need to hear me blather about the weather. I just wanted to let you know I’ve been making excellent progress in streamlining and beefing up the Javascript library that’s included with xajax — you might want to check out the latest developments if you’re at all interested in advanced Ajax + PHP technology.

I also have a series of exciting announcements to make over the next few months…I’m hoping the first one will be sometime in April. It all depends on my time and the feedback I get from private testers. Oops, I’m almost giving it away here. Actually, the first announcement is geared more towards developers than regular users — that comes later. So sit tight and enjoy the show!

Supporting international languages via Ajax seems like it should be easy, since browsers send Ajax data using UTF-8, right? Well, it’s not that simple, because there are a large number of people out there still developing Web applications on the server using older ISO encodings (at least in the PHP world). So, with our project xajax, we wanted to make it easy for people to round-trip international characters using the encoding of their choice. It wasn’t easy, and we made a few false starts, but with the latest release of xajax 0.2.3, I think we finally got it.

So, if you’re a PHP developer and want to take advantage of Ajax, you owe it to yourself to check out xajax. It’s shaping up to be a really solid library. And yes, I’m biased!

(P.S. Got feedback? Let me know!)