Ajax in Action

Chapter 5. The role of the server

This chapter covers

• Using current web framework types with Ajax
• Exchanging data with the server as content, script, or data
• Communicating updates to the server
• Bundling multiple requests and replies into a single HTTP call

This chapter concludes the work that we started in chapter 4: making our applications robust and scalable. We’ve moved from the proof-of-concept stage to something that you can use in the real world. Chapter 4 examined ways of structuring the client code to achieve our goal; in this chapter, we look at the server and, more specifically, at the communication between the client and the server.

We’ll begin by looking at the big picture and discuss what functions the server performs. We’ll ...