Dojo: The Definitive Guide

AJAX Made Easy

Base provides a small suite of functions suitable for use in a RESTful design that significantly simplifies the process of performing routine AJAX operations. Each of these functions provides explicit mechanisms that eliminate virtually all of the boilerplate you'd normally find yourself writing. Table 4-1 summarizes the property values for args.

Representational State Transfer (REST)

REST stands for "Representational State Transfer" and describes an architectural style that is primarily associated with the web. REST is a very resource-centric style, and in a RESTful architecture, URIs define and address resources. The HTTP methods GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE describe the semantic operations that generally involve the action that is being associated with a resource. For example, a GET request on http://example.com/foo/id/1 implies that you are trying to fetch the foo resource that has an id value of 1, while a DELETE request on the same URI would imply that the same resource should be removed.

An excellent reference on REST is the book entitled RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby (O'Reilly).

Table 4-1. Property values for args

Name	Type (Default)	Comment
url	String ("")	The base URL to direct the request.
content	Object ({})	Contains key/value pairs that are encoded in the most appropriate way for the particular transport being used. For example, they are serialized and appended onto the query string as name1=value2 for a GET request but are included as hidden ...