[Catalyst] Gen. principles for JS integration?

[Jesse Sheidlower]

As mentioned in #catalyst and a few times here, I've been
starting to learn and play around with JavaScript in my Cat
apps recently, especially using jQuery. I'm wondering if there
are general principles for how to integrate JS with Cat.

In particular, I'm curious about the best ways to send data
from my controller to my JS. Earlier today in #catalyst I
asked about a particular problem--an AJAX routine that calls a
URL back in the Cat app to transfer its data. The URL is
hard-coded in the JS (which is in a separate file, so I can't
modify it directly with TT). In the first version of this
particular routine, it worked fine--I called it from a :Local
controller method called "sort_list", and I had a relative URL
called "update_sort" or whatever, and it called
http://MyApp/controller_name/update_sort. When I reused it in
another app where it was called from a chained controller, the
same bare URL in the JS tried to call
http://MyApp/controller_name/sort_list/update_sort, which of
course failed.

I don't know the best way to handle this. I'd expect that what
I want to do is pass a variable like "url_to_call" to the JS,
but I don't know how to get it there. I can certainly have a
<script> block in my TT file that simply sets the JS variable
from the stash, but this feels like a kludge. I assume there's
also some way to tweak the controller so that this relative
URL will work properly with chained controllers, but this also
feels like a kludge.

What do people do for this? I should state first and foremost
that I'm not and will never be some big JS guru, and I'm not
looking to build super-flashy Web 2.0 stuff with huge masses
of JS.

Thanks.

Jesse Sheidlower