Bank Senario

Introduction

As the title suggests, this three-part series provides hands-on details about some of the core capabilities of developing an end-to-end Ajax-style application. Such capabilities include learning about specific technologies in the following three application tiers:

* Client tier

* Mid tier

* Data tier

In the client tier, such technologies include XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and XML Http Request (XHR). Among several wonderful mid-tier open source technologies already mentioned, this series uses PHP because of its simplicity and its current widespread availability. The MySQL database is used in the data tier. In addition, this series uses popular Web services technologies such as REST, SOAP, JSON, and XML. You will use all these technologies in the context of an all-in-one scenario.

Install and configure both the runtime and development environments you need to get going with your end-to-end Ajax application development by following the steps in the next sections. Then, instead of the usual Hello World application, for a change, you will analyze and understand a non-trivial banking scenario. This scenario explains the use of all the previously mentioned technology components in the context of a fictitious bank, its back-end database, a browser-based bank customer portal, and a real-life third party finance-related Web service.

Ajax-PHP-based scenario

Figure 4 depicts a non-trivial scenario that deals with providing certain banking-related functions in an Ajax-PHP environment. This scenario introduces you to some of the technology components and follows the traditional architecture style by spanning into the following three tiers:

* Client tier

* Mid tier

* Data tier

In the client tier, this scenario uses browser-based controls enabled through single-page XHTML user interface elements along with XHR and JSON. In the middle tier, it uses PHP techniques such as SimpleXML, Services_JSON, HTTP request processor, and PHP SOAP...