Browser-server transmission via AJAX

We can enhance the user's experience by loading new content directly onto the page via AJAX, rather than loading a new page for each content request.

In this recipe, we're going to transfer our serialized data to the browser as the user requests it and then interact with our client-side data. We'll implement a profile viewer in the browser, which retrieves a selected profile in either JSON or XML, outputting the key values or parent-child nodes for that profile.

Getting ready

We're going to continue to work with our profiles.js object module (from the first two recipes of this chapter), so let's copy that into a new folder. For XML delivery, we'll be using xml2js from the Converting an object to XML and back recipe. If we're starting in a new folder, we'll need to install it with the help of the following command:

npm install xml2js

We'll also create two new files: server.js and index.html.

How to do it…

Let's start with our index.html file. We'll quickly...