NYCPHP Meetup

[LK]

Hello,

I've spent some time developing proficiency in JavaScript and AJAX. Every time
I try to go to the server PHP programming, I end up scratching my head asking
why would anybody program on the server? 

Take form validation, for example. A user registers to a service for the first
time and fills out a registration form. I need to check if the Username is
already taken by someone else. In the JavaScript/AJAX framework the form and
the entire page is available thru the DOM, and I just have a simple query.php
script running on the server to execute queries and send back the result. I
construct the query and AJAX it over to the query.php. If a record with the
same username is found, I alert("...") the user to try it again. The original
form remains on the screen without change. The deal is done.

Not so with the server side programming. The form is submitted to a
process_form.php. Then, if the username already exists in the database, the
script has to rebuild the original form with the previous values filled in by
copying user inputs from the $_POST array back into the HTML for *each* input
field with <?php echo $_POST[] ?>, not to mention session state and other
housekeeping. That seems like a lot of work to implement something so simple.

So what are the advantages of server programming? What what am I missing? 

Thanks 

Leo Kokin

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