Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP

Many of today’s web development books and articles cover single aspects of the development life cycle, delving only into specific features rather than looking at the whole picture. In this book, we will develop a complete web application. Although we will be using various third-party libraries and tools to aid in development, we will be developing the application from start to finish. The focus of this book is on Web 2. 0, a catchphrase that has been in use for a few years now and is typically used to refer to web sites or web applications that have particular char- teristics. Some of these characteristics include the following: • Correctly using HTML/XHTML, CSS, and other standards • Using Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to provide a responsive application without requiring a full refresh of pages • Allowing syndication of web site content using RSS • Adding wikis, blogs, or tags Although not everybody is an advocate of the “Web 2. 0” phrase, the term does signify forward progress in web development. And although not everybody has the need to provide a wiki or a blog on their web site, the other characteristics listed (such as correct standards usage) provide a good basis for a web site and should be used by all developers, regardless of how they want their web site or application categorized. I wrote this book because I want to share with other users how I build web sites.