DHTML Tutorial

[Greg Rundlett]

There's the JSUnit project which you can use to automate testing of your JS code
http://www.edwardh.com/jsunit/

I like wikipedia for researching many things without the 'noise' that
you can get with search engines like Google.  Of course there are
downsides to wikipedia too.  Anyway, they offer info on DHTML
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHTML

The 'rage' right now, in part brought on by the popular
implementations by Google in the form of gmail, google suggests, and
google maps, is xmlHTTPRequest.  xmlHTTPRequest is supported by all
modern browsers (of course in different ways!) and is basically js
being used to transfer data back and forth to the server outside of
the traditional session/page model.[1]

Advanced implementations of this are now being called AJAX], and there
are many free software projects offering AJAX[2] libraries for the
developer.  These projects  enable your application to create
object-oriented js in the client 'on the fly' by reading your
server-side objects as defined in your PHP code.  A PEAR project[3]
was just added in this category, and there are others like Harry
Fueck's JPSPan (site seems to be down today)[4], and entire blogs on
the topic [5]

If you're doing PHP development, you will find that many frameworks
like Horde, WACT, Seagull, ezPublish, etc. have some degree of
xmlHTTPRequest, AJAX and/or DHTML support built in.  It may be useful
to survey how these folks do their DHTML, and in the process you get
familiar with a whole framework that lets you implement larger
solutions.  Warning, I personally have lost enormous amounts of time
b/c Horde is not very documented, and ezPublish is voluminous with
'official' documentation out of sync with development.  Choose and
sample carefully before comitting to a framework.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmlhttprequest
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29
[3] http://pear.php.net/package/HTML_AJAX
[4] http://jpspan.sourceforge.net/
[5] http://ajaxblog.com/  http://blog.joshuaeichorn.com/HTML_AJAX