Ajax and REST Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach will serve all of your Ajax needs, by providing adaptable solutions for common tasks you'll want to implement on web sites using the next generation of Ajax and REST techniques. As a JavaScript developer, your time is precious, so you’ll want to solve problems that present themselves in your work as quickly as possible. You can pick up the code provided in this book, adapt it, or plug it straight into your own applications.

The book mainly focuses on illustrating and explaining how to build applications that use JavaScript, Ajax, and REST Web Services, along with some user interface issues. Specifically, the following topics are covered: implementing JavaScript unit tests, explaining the intent of dynamic languages, Web Services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), defining and implementing contracts using REST, understanding why JavaScript functions have state; implementing JavaScript "Generics", which are a mixture between real Generics and a replacement algorithm, using code blocks, using functions to make decisions, understanding the difference of JavaScript code that behaves like a value type or a reference type, implementing proxies, delegates, mixins, and overloaded functions, implementing a complete Ajax and Web Service architecture, defining a Web Service using REST, handling large or slow or real-time data sets, implementing shopping cart type architectures, and solving the back button problem using Ajax.

Having read this book, you will have learned to modularize your web application by decoupling the client from the server. The decoupling allows a client developer to focus on writing the best JavaScript and Ajax code, and a server developer to write the best business and data objects.