In Chapter 13, you??™ll use a technology named AJAX to upgrade the functionality of your
product catalog and shopping cart. In Chapter 14, you??™ll extend the shopping cart by creating
a checkout system, and you will start storing the details of your customers??™ shopping carts in
the database. This will allow you to implement fancy features such as dynamic product recommendations,
a topic that will be covered in Chapter 15.
CHAPTER 12 ?– CREATING YOUR OWN SHOPPING CART 398
Implementing AJAX Features
In this chapter we??™ll enhance our fully functional shopping cart using the technology that
made web development headlines in 2005. This technology is called AJAX, and it allows you to
make your web applications easier and more pleasant to use for your visitors.
Although AJAX isn??™t a huge subject, at least compared to other programming fields, it
doesn??™t have a trivial learning curve either. We??™re going to be here with you the whole way, but
you should know there are several AJAX books on the market, including two written specifically
for PHP developers: AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications (Cristian Darie, Bogdan
Brinzarea, Filip Chereches-Tosa, and Mihai Bucica, Packt Publishing, 2006.) and Beginning AJAX
with PHP: From Novice to Professional (Lee Babin. Apress, 2006.).
In this chapter we??™ll take you through a very concise AJAX tutorial, and then we??™ll update
TShirtShop to
??? Allow adding new products to the shopping cart without completely reloading the web
page when the Add to Cart buttons are clicked.
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