Who needs PHP?

I've been experimenting with a few new things recently. By "new", I mean new to me. It's very easy to get comfortable in your work and stop thinking of new ways to achieve the same result.

The most exciting 'new thing' has to be XMLHTTPRequest. This is an extension of javascript which allows you to load an XML file into javascript which is then available in the DOM tree. It's currently only supported by IE 6+, Safari and Mozilla (Firefox, et all) which leaves Opera and Konqueror users out in the cold.

I've been thinking of how to apply this technology to IPB - or rather, how the technology can solve some age-old problems. For instance; wouldn't it be nice if we could  bring up a list of recently replied to topics without having to navigate to a new page. Naturally, one could load this data into a hidden DIV before displaying the content to the browser but then we have to add a rather large query to each page load which isn't very desirable at all.

Enter a little bit of javascript trickery, and we have a way of loading recently replied topics into an otherwise hidden DIV. Each click of the link refreshes the content without refreshing the page. That's pretty nifty.

(The screenshot linked to needs much cleaning up and fixing, but the actual engine is working and please excuse the beat up condition of my private development board. It gets like that.).

There are a few other areas which can be enchanced using these methods. I think we can all but replace the "normal" PHP calendar in IPB with a javascripted version which can load the month's data without a screen refresh. Naturally, those without javascript and/or without a sufficient browser can be directed to a different version - but offloading some of the server side processing to the client's browser is appealing.

It is entirely possible to write a PHP engine which saves data and produces XML data on the fly and write the front end entirely in javascript.