Monday, 26 February 2007

PQuery, a New Tool for PHP

Dion Almaer in the Ajaxian web site informs you about the PQuery. For the uninitiated, PQuery is a set of helper classes for JQuery, the JavaScript library. This library allows you to integrate AJAX, Effects and other JQuery functionality into your PHP scripts. He says it has a small footprint and is compatible with PHP4 and PHP 5 versions.

But the PQuery tool has attracted a lot of criticisms from the developers. Stephen Reid says, “This is an awful idea. The beauty of JQuery is that it allows you to easy implement Hijax, storing all behaviours externally to the semantic markup. PQuery destroys this ideal by sticking a load of onclick attributes within the document.”

Digitarald comments, “What, filling page with inline JavaScript and onclick’s? I hope nobody will really consider this help.”

A harsh comment by David says, “Constructive criticism: flush it down the toilet. These ‘helpers’ are the worst plague the web has ever seen and I dare to say they are just as much of a danger to this planet as global warming. This stuff is wrong and useless and harmful by any stretch of the imagination.”

But on a positive note Vikas says, “Well for all those who feel that this shouldn’t be done, there is a group who is thankful and will use it (including me). I never intended to mess things up, my intentions were to get things done faster, easier and in a language I am good at (PHP in case of web dev) and a JS library, which I liked. I could have wrote each and every event handler, effect, Ajax request in a separate file but I work with custom CMS’s and frameworks most of the GUI/HTML is auto generated from Databases and XML, so I like everything in one place. I have other reasons too … but I think they’ll spark more debates so I’ll refrain. I am not forcing you to use them, so rather than criticizing it and wasting your time, do something constructive.”

So, it’s in your discretion if you want to use PQuery. You can download PQuery here.