ajax/index.html

<html>
<title>Simple web apps in python</title>
<body>
<h3>Exploration of simple web applications.</h3>
<p>
Here is a series of increasingly sophisticated web applications to
demonstrate how to write a computational web service in python:
<ul>
<li><a href="direct.html">direct.html</a> is a direct cgi callback which
responds with a new html page containing the results.
Note that the returned page is different from the current page, and
further queries will not be possible without returning to the original
form.  The back button will ask to resubmit the form, which is unpleasant,
and so a forward link back to the original form is provided on the page.
This fills up the browser history, so while simple, it does not provide
a good user experience.
</li>

<li><a href="ajax.html">ajax.html</a> uses an AJAX request to retrieve some
an html response which gets appended to the page, making a single page
web application.
</li>

<li><a href="ajax_json.html">ajax_json.html</a> returns a JSON datastructure
rather than HTML; this can be more useful for computer processing of
results from the web service beyond just showing them to the user in the
browser.
</li>

<li><a href="ajax_image.html">ajax_image.html</a> creates a PNG file on
the server and includes a link to it in the results.
</li>

<li><a href="ajax_jqplot.html">ajax_jqplot.html</a> uses jqplot to plot
the results in the browser so that the png file doesn't need to be
managed on the server, and so that the user can interact with the
graph without having to call back to the server to replot the data
each time.  Having the data in JSON is also much more useful for
other applications that want to use the web service as a computational
backend.
</li>

</ul>

</p>
<p>
See source on <a href="http://github.com/pkienzle/pyplay/tree/master/ajax">github</a>.
</p>
</body>
</html>