A Database-Enabled XHR

Learning how to create a database-enabled XHR is like making your first database interaction. It opens a whole new world of possibilities and is not as complicated as you would think; it is trivial compared to the complex functionality that you can achieve with database-integrated Ajax. To use this model, we would start with a request to a server-side language. The server-side language would query the database, based on what was requested, via custom methods that we would write to handle specific database interactions. After the data has been received by the server-side language, it can be returned to the XHR that originally requested it as XML, JSON, or text and handled by the client-side code. This request allows users to retrieve custom data based on the requests that they make.

Although this request model is quite a bit more powerful than a standard request, you might want even more control. The next model will provide you with the ability to post data to the database and receive data based on the request, or simply receive a Boolean for a successful database INSERT, all without refreshing the page.