Our friend David had some time on his hands and a great idea for a web app: that's the recipe for success. Wanting to concentrate on the PHP back-end, he brought in a friend to develop the AJAX front-end.

Unfortunately, things started to get thorny when it came to connecting the two. The browser-side demo looked great but all the forms were submitting data through GET instead of POST. This was a major problem for the application, so David got a shovel and dug into the "AJAX".

Here's what he found. 

  <form
  id="form"
  action="javascript:postLine(document.getElementById('form').msg.value);"
  >
      <input type="text" name="msg" size="80" />
      <input type="submit" name="form" value="Send" />
  </form>

 

Maybe that wasn't the best use of action but this was just a prototype; they could fix it later. The real question was: what does postLine do? 

function postLine(text) {
    var url = "send.php?msg=" + text;
    url = base_url + url;
    var jsel = document.createElement('SCRIPT');
    jsel.type = 'text/javascript';
    jsel.src = url;
    document.body.appendChild(jsel);
    document.getElementById('form').msg.value='';
}

 

To quote David: "Not the AJAX you would expect is it?" It's probably worth mentioning --- before anyone gets any bright ideas --- that "send.php" doesn't return JavaScript.

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