http request with javascript for JSON object in a locally hosted API

Question

I have a API running on my machine locally written in sinatra and jruby which interacts with a sql server. Now, 'localhost:4567/get/233310/loc' returns a JSON object

[{"uid":233307,"lat":41.4191113333333,"long":-72.8941905}]

What I want to do, for now is get this JSON object and assign each of the object to a variable in my javascript..which I think would best done with a http request? (if there's a better way..please do let me know).

Eventually, I need this to make the request every 30 secs but I will deal with that later.

Can anyone help me with this??

Thank you.

Answer 1

Another useful library is called Prototype. Read about it here:

http://www.prototypejs.org/

The code to make a request like this in Prototype is really easy. Just include the prototype.js library on your page:

<script src="prototype.js"></script>

Then run this code:

var url = 'http://localhost:4567/get/233310/loc'; new Ajax.Request(url, { method: 'get', onSuccess: function(transport) { var json = transport.responseJSON; window.alert(json.inspect()); } });

When this completes, you should see a pop up alert with the contents of your JSON object displayed.

Your server side script should serve up the JSON with the HTTP header "Content-Type" set to "application/json" so that the client side script code understands that it should try to parse it as JSON.

Hope this is useful.