There's a new tutorial from Noupe.com today that walks you through the process of making a customized statistics program by combining HTML, Javascript (some Ajax) and PHP. In this case, they're looking to track the visitors to a website.

When creating a website, one main goal is to attract visitors. Traffic generation is a necessity for monetary purposes, showing off your work, or just expressing your thoughts. There are many ways to create traffic for your website. Search engines, social bookmarking, and word of mouth are just a few examples. But how do you know whether this traffic is genuine? How do you know if your visitors are coming back for a second time?

The application they help you build (demo here) doesn't do any graphic with the data, so you'd need an external tool like JPGraph to create it. It does, however, provide you will the complete code to not only count the total visits from an IP but also which resources were hit and how many times they've been accessed. The backend is a SQLite database accessed through PHP.

Arnold Daniels has a new post to his blog today dealing with something (usually companies) are looking towards to help deal with the infamous "too many passwords for too many places" issue - a simple single sign-on tool that can be dropped in an used anywhere.

Associated websites often share user information, so a visitor only has to register once and can use that username and password for all sites. A good example for this is Google. [...] There are many single sign-on applications and protocols. Most of these are fairly complex. [...] I've written a simple single sign-on solution (400 lines of code), which works by linking sessions. This solutions works for normal websites as well as AJAX sites.

He compares the flow on a non-single sign-on site (lots of fetching between the client/server) and the first/following visits with his tool in place. You can download the source here (as well as the Ajax broker).

Christoph Dorn has posted a guide to integrating the FirePHP tool into your application to aid in Ajax debugging.

My purpose in this column is to introduce you to FirePHP, the problem it solves, and how it is intended to work within your application for maximum benefit. I will present some useful high-level knowledge to make it easier for you to integrate FirePHP into your application. This is not a step-by-step tutorial. I have made a complete demo available for download, along with some useful libraries illustrating all the concepts covered here. I want to emphasize that the demo is only one possible implementation. There are many other possibilities.

He sets up his problem - figuring out a good way to debug Ajax applications without resorting to alert boxes - and the solution he found worked best for him. By using the FirePHP library he could send back the results (or any other information) from the backend call without needing to go through any more hassle than installing Firebug and the FirePHP tool. (Obviously, this only works in Firefox. Internet Explorer users might want to try out Fiddler.)

New on his blog Jani Hartikainen has posted a simple idea that you can take to make sure you're getting the most out of your Ajax/Zend Framework connections.

A common reason to use Ajax in a website is to make it feel faster, so you usually want Ajax requests be processed as quickly as possible. While there are many ways to speed up Zend Framework based applications, there are still some things like routing and dispatching which still add up to the total. There is, however, another way to make Ajax work even faster

Since Ajax requests don't usually require all of the complex routing and dispatching that a normal Zend Framework request might, he recommends creating a separate Ajax handler. His includes an example of a simple searching endpoint with a class handling the backend logic. A simple handler script loads up the bootstrap and makes the request for the search, returning the search results in a JSON format.

Noupe.com has posted a top ten list of what they consider some of the best PHP/Ajax-based webmail clients (as based on the user interface and ease of use).

Employees need to access their email from wherever they happen to be '" on the road, at customer sites, remote offices, and at home. [...] Today i wanted to share with you 10 AJAX-based webmail client that delivers the look and feel, usability and performance of a desktop application. Some of the webmail clients listed below are open source code that can be easily modified to better suit user's needs, while others are not. So You must check their license to know the rules.

Included in their list is software like:

• RoundCube
• Zimbra
• SquirrelMail
• Hastymail
• Claros inTouch

Some of these tools offer more than just email too - they can include things like collaboration tools and mobile versions right out of the box.

In this new article from Noupe.com they link to several resources that can help you make your site's forms a bit "more beautiful" by combining PHP and Ajax (and Javascript).

Forms needs a solid visual structure, a profound hierarchy of form elements (Fields and Labels), powerful techniques and Functionality (AJAX) to make the form look and work creatively. [...] Today we wanted to share with you some great steps to get the perfect form: we will go through designing and usability you need to keep in mind, styling your form, spicing it up with some nice javascript effects, validating user's input and finally getting it to work using PHP and Ajax.

Some of the links include:

• Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms
• Justify elements using jQuery and CSS
• XHTML/CSS web forms: 5 simple techniques
• Using ProtoForm
• Autosuggest / Autocomplete with Ajax

Most of the article links also include links to demos of the tutorial/application in action.

Dan Wellerman has written up a tutorial for NETTUTS.com about making a jQuery and PHP-powered tag cloud out of the tagging already a part of your site.

Aside from the actual links themselves, which give people an idea of the subjects that your site covers, they can also show how popular the different subjects are. Another great thing about tag-clouds is that they can be used to describe the frequency of anything; you can link to articles, blog posts, images, video, or anything else that you have in abundance on your site.

The javascript makes an Ajax call back to a PHP script waiting in the background (that pulls the tags out of their example database). It puts them into a JSON format and pushes them back out to the script, though they should have gone with json_encode instead of their own partial soltuon.

The jQuery then parses the JSON message back out and drops it into CSS styled divs already in the page. As always, the source in available for download.

In a recent post to the Zend Developer Zone Vikram Vaswani takes a look at using AJAX quickly and easily in your applications with the help of the HTML_AJAX PEAR package.

Well, PHP is commonly used on the server end of the connection, to handle AJAX requests and send back responses. But that isn't all it can do - with a little PEAR package called HTML_AJAX, you can use PHP to significantly simplify the work that goes into building and deploying an AJAX application. That's where this article comes in. Over the next few pages, I'm going to give you a quick run-down on the PEAR HTML_AJAX class, together with a few examples of how you can use it to AJAX-ify various Web applications.

He goes through the whole process - installing the package and five example scripts to show it in action:

• Pulling from a simple database table of book and author information
• Calculating simple interest
• Creating a simple calendar
• Evaluating an inputted number
• Simple login validation

On the PHPBuilder.com site Anthony Corbelli has a new tutorial looking at the differences between using GET and POST in the context of an Ajax-enabled application.

GET is typically used when you simply need to retrieve data and POST is used when you want to change the state of the server (i.e. send/update data on the server). This article will discuss how we use GET and POST methodology in our Ajax applications!

Complete code for his examples is included - both the Javascript and PHP sides. His example handles both GET and POST requests the same way, returning the city and zip information.

Andrew Wulf passed along a note about an ajax-based PHP documentation site aimed at making it simple to get at the PHP manual from a single page interface.

I wrote this little app for my own needs initially, as PHP is such a big monster that it was hard to find the right documentation, or discover which of the N similar packages I should use. When I moved servers I fixed up the app enough and decided to release it to the world. It's pretty handy as is, but there are still several things I need to add, particularly paging through the documentation, and supporting bookmarks.

The site, phpdox.net, supports two kinds of searches - one through an index of page titles and another through the hierarchical names of the documentation's filenames.