Question

Here is a quite straight forward jQuery code I find on one site:

//It simply loads more news
  function ReadMore(page){
       $("#news-list").html('Loading More News...');
       $("#news-list").append('<img src="/images/loading.gif">');   
        next=parseInt(page)+1;      
        html=$.get('/morenews.php','page='+page,function (data){                
            $("#News").append(data);
            $("#news-list").html("<a href='javascript:void(0);' onclick='ReadMore("+next+");'>More News</a>");
        });         
}

My question is:

1. What kind of datatype is it using? “Expected data type of the response. One of: null, ‘xml’, ‘script’, or ‘json’. ”

2. What is html=$.get('/newread.php','page='+page,function (data){} in jQuery? I have never seen $.get and there seems to be one parameter page.

3. Does the server receive something like this: /morenews.php?page=3

4. This code cant deal with errors. If the server is too busy, let’s say, doing nothing for 20 seconds, how can I add some error messages?

By the way, jQuery seems to be a weird language because it constantly create anonymous functions.

Answer 1

1. page is an integer (although it gets typecast to a string when sent to the server as part of an HTTP GET request). data is an html string.

2. See jQuery.get( url , data , success() ). It’s shorthand for $.ajax(). The success() function is a callback, which gets exectuted once a response is received from the server.

3. Yes: /morenews.php?page=3

4. You could try adding a timeout function to cancel the request if there’s been no response within a given time.

The language is Javascript (jQuery is just a library), and anonymous functions are really cool when you get used to them…