CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjavascriptjson
Lucas
Lucas

Reputation: 1

Displaying database content - PHP vs Javascript

I am (mostly) a front-end developer working on a prototype with a backend guy on a site. The basics of it would require a user login area, as well as a search form that would search and return results from a database table.

He is doing the backend logic with Java and PostgreSQL. He proposes to return a JSON format to me upon a query. This means I will have to take the data from the JSON string and populate/create the HTML markup. I can do this with either Javascript, or PHP. It seems to be that PHP would be a no brainer as I don't need to create HTML markup with Javascript/jQuery and also all the data populated by the server already, reducing the load on the client side, but this means as a "front-end" person I am also writing PHP.

And regarding loading all server data onto a page with Javascript, is this standard practice? Or should it only be used on AJAX?

Should the backend guy be generating the markup as well? What's the best way of separating this frontend and backend work? THanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1219

Answers (3)

Zachary K
Zachary K

Reputation: 3335

I send the data from the server to the browser in JSON all the time, format on the browser with templates of one form or another. I would rather work with arrays in Javascript as the array methods like map and filter make it much easier.

Upvotes: 0

Basic
Basic

Reputation: 26766

A good compromise would be to do either:

Option 1

A small PHP script server-side which formats the restults into a table with appropriate Ids/similar to allow javascript to add classes for styling. This entire table could be returned via an AJAX call and placed within a placeholder div on the page.

Option 2

The server returns simple JSON to the front-end, the front-end uses whatever mechanism it sees fit to build the appropriate HTML

The first one is a little cleaner to code - The generation of the HTML is seperated from the styling, but it's an extra hop (the PHP) and is slightly inflexible - the JS can modify the table as appropriate but it's limited by the html PHP sends.

The second is slightly more verbose to code but completely flexible.

Upvotes: 0

Christian Kuetbach
Christian Kuetbach

Reputation: 16060

If you are using PHP, you are a backend-guy, too.

If the markup is generated by the server, than you would usually not write an AJAX-application, because the markup is generated by the server.

In fact if you want to write a ajax-application, you have to manipulte the DOM with Javascript. Use jQuery or something like that to do this.

Seperating frontend and backend is done by creating an Interface, a contract which will separate the UI from the Backend-Logic. In your case the contract is the format of your JSON Data.

Upvotes: 1

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