ScriptServer 0.2

Harry Fuecks announced the release of ScriptServer 0.2 in his blog a couple of days ago. I mentioned the project in my blog only a couple of weeks ago and it is impressive how far he has progressed since then. Here's the description from the documentation:

ScriptServer provides tools to "hook up" PHP and Javascript, for the purpose of fetching data from PHP into a web page which has already loaded, without reloading the entire page.

The objective is to make connecting a Javascript client with a PHP server as painless and error-free as possible. To this end ScriptServer allows you to define a class in PHP and call it’s methods directly (and remotely) from Javascript. That means if you have a PHP class like;

<?php
//...
class Math {
   function add($x, $y) {
       return $x + $y;
   }
}
//...
?>

You can use this class "natively" from JavaScript on the client-side, calling it like;

var m = new math();
alert( m.add(2,2) );

The intent is to make building "sticky" DHTML or web-based XUL http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/ applications, where the user interface remains static (not reloaded) in the users web browser, while data can be fetched dynamically from a remote web server, in response to user events.

Posted by Tom on September 29, 2004