Using Atlas from PHP

As some people have noticed, I've been playing around with Atlas, Microsoft's AJAX framework for ASP.NET 2.0, in the last couple of months. I found it quite interesting, but always wondered whether some of the functionality could also be used from PHP. Now Shanku Niyogi from the Atlas team has posted some code that demonstrates how to use some of Atlas' features (most noticeably the Google Suggest-like AutoCompleteExtender). I think this brings a really interesting angle to the framework. Obviously not all Atlas features can be available to other technologies (due to the server-side portions of Atlas that use .NET), but I maybe some other functionality will be ported, as well.

If you are interested in this, all you need is Shanku's code and of course Atlas itself, available from the Atlas homepage. The file AtlasSetup.msi is a Windows installer. Unfortunately, I am not aware of a non-Windows utility that extracts data from an MSI file, but at least MSI files can be installed using WINE (see this document for more information).
During the course of installation, Atlas' client-side script libraries will be unpacked; these have to be put in the ScriptLibrary folder of the Atlas-PHP bridge. FWIW, a VSI file will be created as well, a Visual Studio Integration installer. This is basically a ZIP archive (despite the .vsi extension) containing website templates for Atlas. However since the March release of Atlas, these VSI files do not contain the client-side script libraries anymore, but only server-side components (that, in turn, create the client-side libraries).