In the past, Microsoft has said that its ASP.NET AJAX (Atlas) framework could be used sans Microsoft development tools. Particularly, the client-side library in ASP.NET AJAX can interact with several web-based programming languages as it consists of nothing more than JavaScript. That being said, one industrious Microsoft dev has gone ahead and created a library called "PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library" that allows PHP developers to easily interact with Microsoft's rich client framework.
According to the release notes, "The current release supports creating web service proxies in PHP code such that the Microsoft AJAX Library can call them from client-side code. Future releases will support localization and globalization, debug and release scripts, and more features inspired by ASP.NET AJAX." The current release is in the Alpha stage of development.
The requirements for PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library are a web server and PHP 5.2. Previous versions of PHP can be used, but you will have to manually install php-json. Examples describing how to use the library are available at both Smarx.com and CodePlex. The library can also be downloaded from CodePlex as well.
While PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library is one of the first major offshoot projects based on ASP.NET AJAX, several more are sure to come. The company has made the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0 (what a name) source code freely available for download, and the source for the AJAX Control Toolkit is also available.
I asked this question when ASP.NET AJAX was Atlas, but I'm going to ask it again: How many of you are using ASP.NET AJAX? Have you found it easy to use? Has anyone tried it with PHP?
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