Sending Email with AJAX: Interacting with the Server

As I previously explained, below is the source code list that corresponds to the “addcontact.php” PHP file, which as you’ll probably recall, is tasked with inserting new nodes into the XML file that stores contact data:

$file='contacts.xml';
array_map('trim',$_POST);
$str='<contact>'."\n".'<name>'.$_POST
['fullname'].'</name>'."\n".'<email>'.$_POST
['email'].'</email>'."\n".'</contact>'."\n".'</contactlist>';
if(!$fp=fopen($file,'r+')){
  trigger_error('Error opening contacts file',E_USER_ERROR);
}
$contents=fread($fp,filesize($file));
rewind($fp);
$contents=str_replace('</contactlist>',$str,$contents);
//header('Content-Type: text/xml');
fwrite($fp,$contents);
fclose($fp);

Is the above PHP script now fresh in your mind? I hope so. Now, let’s complete the server-side application layer, by showing how a sample XML contact file would look:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<contactlist>
<contact>
<name>Full Name 1</name>
<email>address1@domain1.com</email>
</contact>
<contact>
<name> Full Name 2</name>
<email> address2@domain2.com </email>
</contact>
<contact>
<name> Full Name 3</name>
<email> address3@domain3.com </email>
</contact>
<contact>
<name> Full Name 4</name>
<email> address4@domain4.com </email>
</contact>
<contact>
<name> Full Name 5</name>
<email> address5@domain5.com </email>
</contact>
</contactlist>

All right, at this stage, I think I’ve finished defining the building blocks that comprise the complete server-side layer of my AJAX email application. As you’ve seen, a couple of extendable PHP snippets are all I need to get the program interacting in a seamless way with the server. This should demonstrate that building up this kind of applications isn’t difficult at all.

However, this AJAX-driven email application wouldn’t be complete without listing together both client and server-side layers, which can be quite useful if you want to have the entire source code available in one place. Keeping this in mind, jump into the last two sections of this article, in order to see how the complete AJAX-driven program looks.