Building Ajax-ified Web-Applications with Mac OS X, PHP, Code Igniter, Prototype, and Scriptaculous

This series will henceforth be known as the "From Scratch" collection. Today's writing (as well as unofficial title) is "From Scratch: Overview."

With all the hoopla over Rails, Django, and (Insert Other Popular Framework Here), people are starting to become curious about how they, too, can start building neat web-applications. Many of our web-hackers, however, are too busy to sit down and learn a proper language to facilitate this. "We were raised on PHP," they say, "And we're sticking to it!" Fair enough.

People are always comparing X vs Y. Looking over my logs, I see a lot of the traffic generated to my old blog had queries like "PHP vs Django" or "Code Igniter Ruby". The problem with these queries is they're mixing lingo.

• Code Igniter is a framework written in PHP.
• Django is a framework written in Python.
• Rails is a framework written in Ruby.

If you happen to be one of those poor souls who has been flamed for mixing up the terminology, have no fear. They're flaming to compensate for something. Like running Windows.

Moving on.

Everyone seems to have their favorite framework, language. They usually have good reason. Ruby is a beautiful language. Django is an amazing framework. PHP runs everywhere. Everywhere.

So, I'm focusing on PHP, both because it's still everywhere, and because I have the most experience with that particular language. Yes, it's verbose and ugly and there are no namespaces and sometimes I want to cry and... hey, it works.

This collection will cover the following:

1. Setting up your Mac OS X box with PHP and MySQL
2. Creating a local, virtual domain for development
3. Setting up Code Igniter on your virtual domain (pretty URLs included)
4. Hello, World! Hello, Papa Ajax!
   
5. Techniques for Ajax-based development
6. How to conquer the world in three easy steps

Of course, we'll also run into the usual fare: data modeling, MVC-separation, and things which I do because I think they're right.

Here we go...