Question

Building a Jquery application which calls a number of endpoints to access data from two different web apps in my application. At one point the output on the page is dependant on data from both webservices. For example when a user submits a search webservice A retrieves codes for an item , then webservice B makes a call using the codes so it can get more details. These details are then displayed in a results table.

At the moment i have an ajax call and when it gets the codes it then calls webservice B using another ajax call to get details.

Should i be lookin to cut down on the number of roundtrips to the server by making the second webservice call from my server or is this acceptable behavior? I dont have the option to merge the code behind the webservices so i have to continue accessing the data via two distinct calls.
thanks

Answer 1

Here is my advice:
– Do it server side for the following reasons

1. You’ll have a better and transparent extensibility to adress other data sources , that may use different protocols (SOAP for example).
2. It won’t require to perform some “business logic” of data combination & filtering client side , which is a very very bad practice
3. It will let you define a clean & totally controlled application protocol between your client & your server. If you manage to do it well, this “protocol” can even be relatively agnostic of served data, and could accept some client driven parameters (as the serialization format you’ll prefer (JSON or XML or whatever suits your need)
4. This server controlled approach can be bound both to an API that you can reuse late in other client applications and also to “server side” rendering code that could perform business logic to drive html rendering based on server received data from the web services.