Cheers,
Andrew

Tough question – it depends on what server side technologies you’re using.

For help.xero.com we’ve got an ASP.NET MVC back-end so all the calls are made to restful interfaces returning JSON objects. Essentially I’m using the MVC site as a restful web service. Within the application we use an HTTP handler which marshals calls through to objects based on attributes. Both approaches return .NET objects that are then serialized to JSON before being returned in the response.

I have also played with ExtJS over a WCF web service (again returning JSON) – WCF is a bit of a pain but there are plugins to ExtJS that make it easier.

One of the keys to any kind of AJAX web application is to forget the X part – whatever server side technology and approach you use you should always be returning JSON as it uses less data across the wire and is faster for JavaScript to parse. Having said that AJAJ doesn’t sound quite as cool as AJAX (and doesn’t it have to have an X in the acronym to be Web 2.0?)

Craig

In 2==1==0, 2==1 is evaluated first and the result is false. As in JavaScript 0 is considered as false therefore false==false. The above expression will always return true.

Good comment, really got me thinking.

Here’s a related one for you then: this should take you back to comp-sci 101.

if(2 == 1 == 0) {
console.log(“All things being equal…”);
}