JPSPAN provides tools to "hook up" PHP and Javascript, for the purpose of fetching data from PHP into a web page which has already loaded, without reloading the entire page
M. Lee, L. Yang, W. Hsu, and X. Yang. CIKM '02: Proceedings of the eleventh international conference on Information and knowledge management, page 292--299. New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, (2002)