Different ways of interacting with servers in JavaScript

Most of the web pages and web application we see now a days are rarely static pages. These dynamic web pages and application request contents from servers and updates the document, without having to reload the whole page; this is exactly what AJAX let us do. AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It originally used XML for formatting the data that’s why the name stuck, but now a days its more common to see JSON(JavaScrip Object Notation) for data processing. There are more than one way of retrieving and sending data to the servers and today we will explore couple of these methods.

Using XHR(XML Http Request) Object:

Even though the name suggest XHR would work only with the XML, we can use XHR to retrieve JSON data as well. Let’s look at a simple XHR request.

In above example, we first create a XHR object and pass any url you would like to send your request to. Then we open that request using .open() method and once the request is open we can send the request over using .send() method. Finally, we will print out the text version of the data using .responseText, but before that we check if the response is complete by checking the “readystatechange” value.

Using Fetch API:

The fetch() method, takes care of opening the connection and sending the request without us having to do anything. First we pass the url to the fetch() method and then we convert the response to json using .json() and finally we take that data and just print it out. In the above example, we have that specified what kind of method we are using to use for the given fetch request, by default it is always ‘GET’. If you want to make other requests, we can pass them as second argument to fetch along with other informations like headers. So, the data object that we would pass as an argument would look something like this.

We can see, sending a ‘POST’ request is also very simple to follow and require less amount of code using fetch. Its simplicity is one of the reasons why using fetch API is much more popular these days than XHR.

That’s all for this edition of my blog, until next time happy coding.

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