This article is about a technical aspect of computer programming and since I know that many of my readers are not computer programmers, and of those that are, many do not program in PHP, you may safely ignore it unless it interests you.

As I’ve been working on a light-weight data access layer for PHP5.1+ that I hope to release as open source in the near future, I have discovered an annoying design flaw in PHP.

Support for a more object-oriented approach to programming has been greatly improved since the introduction of PHP5. PHP also offers some magic methods that can be used to simulate properties and methods without having to actually declare them individually. These are great for implementing on the fly methods and properties.

But these magic “overloading” methods don’t function exactly as expected when it comes to inherited child classes.

Today is the one year anniversary of my open source project: xajax!

The xajax project was registered with SourceForge.net on May 24th 2005, just slightly more than 3 months after the very term Ajax was coined by Jesse James Garrett in his article published on February 18, 2005 at Adaptive Path.

We’ve come a long way since then, thanks to the great efforts and skill of Jared White and Eion Robb.

I’m pleased to announce the release of xajax version 0.2.

The xajax PHP library allows PHP developers to easily add Ajax functionality to their PHP driven websites. A big thank you to Jared White for his excellent work on the project and to our wonderful forum participants who have helped debug, submitted code improvements, and suggested feature enhancements.

Also a special thanks to those who donated money to the project. The donations will help us pay for hosting for the new xajax webite, wiki, and forum .

One interesting subject that has come up in the the xajax project forum is using our xajax library to implement PHP driven Ajax for XUL applications written to run in Mozilla based browsers like Firefox. In case you don’t know about it already, XUL is Mozilla’s XML-based User interface Language. Developers use XUL to create extensions for Firefox, among other things.

One of my many projects is xajax. I created the xajax PHP library as an open source project earlier this year to help people add Ajax capabilities to their PHP-based web projects.

We have created a beta test of the upcoming xajax version 0.2 release.