Simple Ajax with Django
So, the Django developers, in my opinion, are freaking smart. Instead of bundling Django with a particular library, they have added XML and JSON serialization; us humble users can choose whatever AJAX library we want. Prototype 1.5.1 has been pretty fun to work with, so I’ll kick off this demo with a really simple example.
How simple? The intended goal is to have the total number of ‘dirts’ update without user intervention. Laaaammmeee. If you are a visual type of person, take a look on the Colddirt huh page. That number automatically increases without user intervention. And this is how.
The process (some pseudocode) will go like this:
check /dirt_count/ for an update
if update:
make number bigger
else:
check less frequently
Pretty simple, eh?
urls.py
(r'^dirt_count/$', views.dirt_count),
As you can see, it just sends the request to the view.
views.py
def dirt_count(request):
from django.http import HttpResponse
countd = str(Dirt.objects.all().count())
return HttpResponse(countd, mimetype='text/plain')
Pretty simple – count the dirts. That makes sense.
dirty.js
new Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater('dirtcount', '/dirt_count/', {
method: 'get',
frequency: 3,
decay: 2,
});
Yea, Prototype makes that real easy. Just make sure to have a element in your template somewhere with an id of ‘dirtcount’.
templates/huh.html
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