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PHP, Apache, and MySQL are all part of the open source group of software programs. The open source movement is basically a collaboration of some of the finest minds in computer programming. By allowing the open exchange of information, programmers from all over the world contribute to make a truly powerful and efficient piece of software available to everyone. 

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AJAX as a development method isn't exactly new,  there are plenty of libraries available that can take care of the dirty work. Recently, with renewed interest  in AJAX, the number of available libraries has been increasing dramatically and existing libraries have been maturing rapidly.

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The explosive interest in AJAX is somewhat of a double-edged sword. There was a similar boom in the use of Macromedia's Flash product. Clients were asking for it because it looked cool. Just as with Flash, AJAX introduces usability and accessibility concerns, many of which are solved problems in traditional web applications.

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Even the methods now referred to as " AJAX" are not new. Microsoft's version of the interface, XMLHTTP, has been available as an ActiveX object in various incarnations since a preview release of IE 5.0 in late 1998 (the final release of IE 5.0 was in March 1999). Companies have been capitalizing on this development model in IE-only environments for years. Beginning slightly before the release of version 1.0 of Mozilla's browser product, a native object, modeled after Microsoft's interface and named XMLHttpRequest, has been available. Recently, Safari (since version 1.2), Opera (since version 8), and Konqueror have included compliant interfaces, also named XMLHttpRequest. 

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For you to use a network card, special functions have to be present in your Linux kernel that understand the particular way this device is accessed. The software that implements these functions is called a device driver. Linux has device drivers for many different types of network interface cards: ISA, PCI, MCA, EISA, Parallel port, PCMCIA, and more recently, USB.

But what do you mean when you say a driver handles a device? Let's consider an Ethernet card. The driver has to be able to communicate with the peripheral's on-card logic somehow: it has to send commands and data to the card, while the card should deliver any data received to the driver.