Sending Data to the Server with AJAX
Note to self: the short answer to the (implied) question, in this title of this post, is: use application/x-www-form-urlencoded HTTP posts and then slowly migrate over to Web Services when the schema-based formalism is needed.
What’s really great is that my sudden realization of the possibility of using ASPX pages as REST service endpoints. A strongly-typed request bag can be defined to quickly collect data and send it to a database. One could have an ASP.NET web application without a user interface. This realization overlooks all the hard work Scott Guthrie and his team put into ASP.NET 2.0—but then again Atlas may have something to say about this…
References
| Title | Note |
|---|---|
| “[Forms in HTML Documents](http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html)” | Formally defines the bread and butter of REST remote procedure calls—namely “form content types” especially the all-important `application/x-www-form-urlencoded` type. |
| “[AJAX Form POST Request—HTML Form POST/Submit with AJAX/Javascript Example/Tutorial](http://www.captain.at/howto-ajax-form-post-request.php)” | This tutorial inspired me to link to the first item in this table. |
| “[Call SOAP Web services with AJAX, Part 1](http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/ws-wsajax/)” | IBM of course would plug SOAP—because this means Java. |
| “[Async Requests over an Unreliable Network](http://ajaxblog.com/archives/2005/06/01/async-requests-over-an-unreliable-network)” | “The biggest void in the discussion, IMO, is how network and server availability affects XMLHttpRequests.” And of course we must prepare for when the network is down. |
| “[XMLHttpRequest Call](http://www.ajaxpatterns.org/XMLHttpRequest_Call)” | The “Handling POSTs and Other Request Types” section makes sense here… |