[Catalyst] implementing ajax

[Matt Pitts]

I'm going to have to be the red-headed stepchild that advocates XML...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mesdaq, Ali [mailto:amesdaq at websense.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 5:19 PM
> To: The elegant MVC web framework
> Subject: RE: [Catalyst] implementing ajax
> 
> Jennifer,
> 
> Are you sure you want to stick with this route? Looks like your going
> to
> make a lot of work for yourself. I would hate to see the js code to
> make
> xml. Use the js code to just post the values you want read those
values

I can't speak too much on the generation of XML on the client, but I do
advocate the use of POST rather than uploading an XML body. Most of the
popular JS toolkits make this quite easy.

> Why would you want to use JSON? Because javascript can just read it
> straight in and you can use it without having to parse anything. Your
> js
> would just eval the returned json content and use it. If you return
xml
> you will need to parse it out and just makes a lot of work.

The main reason against JSON for me is security. Something that can be
eval'd is very dangerous and I'm sure we're all aware of the cross-site
vulnerabilities that take advantage of JSON returned data. The one thing
that's always mentioned as total failsafe against it is to *not* use
JSON as your returned data structure.

As far as parsing the XML, that's why I use ExtJS. I can define a Store
and use XPath to map Record fields to my XML data - ExtJS does the rest.
It's a bit like having a Model of my data on the client side.

Just my 2 cents.

v/r
-matt pitts