CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjavascriptjqueryajaxcodeigniter
Seong Lee
Seong Lee

Reputation: 10520

Ajax with PHP - Is Ajax a replacement of server side "View" of MVC?

I am using PHP mvc framework (Codeigniter) for my web blog.

I am going to implement Ajax for the first time to see the real benefit myself.

I guess what I've done from the view such as formatting and display result on html page can now be replaced by the Ajax implementation. So I guess the view of the the server side mvc would no longer be used.

With a form validation, it is suggested to gear up with logic for both client and server in case javascript gets bypassed. I guess the same concept applies here with Ajax when javascript is disabled from client browser. I mean, you get no data when it's disabled. What would be the back up solution for this scenario like how validation is handled?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 497

Answers (1)

Andrew Noyes
Andrew Noyes

Reputation: 5298

You've asked two questions but I'm just going to answer the first one: can AJAX replace the role a server-side view traditionally had?

In MVC web frameworks the view is a template for converting data passed in from the controller into HTML, however, client-side templating languages have become quite popular and are a perfectly reasonable alternative to rendering HTML output on the server, and they have definite advantages.

Firstly, since you're not sending an entire HTML payload to the client browser but instead just the content, you can save significantly on bandwidth. Generating the HTML client side allows you to transmit only data (like JSON or XML) to the client. The server side view would simply contain script tags pointing to the JavaScript templates and the content payload.

Secondly, since these JavaScript templates can be served up from a CDN, you benefit from the speed of those networks plus caching across pages, so the user is likely only downloading those templates which are unique to a specific page as well as data.

However, there are some disadvantages, such as SEO, although there are some workarounds for that. One option would be to serve up an SEO friendly version of the page to crawlers using a server side view, or simply render your templates server-side using Node.js or Rhino. The beauty of writing templates in a language that compiled to JavaScript is that both the server and the browser and execute them, which can be said for no other language.

Upvotes: 1

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