development

What's extraordinary about the open source community is that this level of support happens all the time, every day, without charge, in hundreds, thousands of projects out there. People that can get to the bottom of a problem and fix it at the source, not just provide a workaround, are directly reachable and motivated to see their software work as well as possible. They're not hidden away from the public behind a large corporation, unreachable with layers of clueless support script readers stuffed between you and them.

We're doing a fair amount of AJAX development these days, and ran into a problem with the REST convention. Thought I'd put my notes here in case somebody else runs into this.

REST, short for "Representational State Transfer" is a new-ish approach to managing state in a web application. With PHP, you typically manage state using its session features, which pass a cookie back and forth from the browser. Then the server needs to store values for each browser session, mirroring in some fashion the data in the browser with a cache on the server.