Question

I know AJAX will not be what it is called, but I am looking for something similar that can be done from within PHP itself (not using javascript).

Basically, as the PHP is creating the page, I want to query an API to gather some information that will be used on the current page. Is this possible, and if so what would be the best method?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use fopen or curl:

Here is an example to open a connection to twitters API, read the public timeline and output parts of it.

<?php
$fp = fopen("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/public_timeline.json?count=3&include_entities=false","r");
while($data = fgets($fp))
{
    $json .= $data;
}
$arr = json_decode($json);
print_r($arr);
?>