Handle java object in javascript

Question

I am using Ajax in my JavaScript and that sets an array of objects of following class in a response:

public class RetrieveTempSecVersions {

    private String templateName;
    private int[] versionNumber;

    public String getTemplateName() {
        return templateName;
    }

    public void setTemplateName(String templateName) {
        this.templateName = templateName;
    }

    public int[] getVersionNumber() {
        return versionNumber;
    }

    public void setVersionNumber(int[] i) {
        this.versionNumber = i;
    }
}

using:

aoRes.setContentType("text/xml");
aoRes.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache");
aoRes.getWriter().write(template[]);

Now I want to read all the elements from template array and its details into my JavaScript.

Can anyone help me in how to do that?

Answer 1

Have you considered using Google Web Toolkit? With GWT you have a number of choices for sending objects between client and server, including GWT RPC, RequestFactory, and JSON.

Answer 2

You need to transform your array of Java objects into something JavaScript understands. There are two obvious choices : XML (AJAX means Asynchronous Javascript And XML), or JSON. JSON is probably easier and more lightweight.

All the AJAX JavaScript libraries (JQuery, etc.) have good support for JSON. See http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.getJSON/ for example.

There are also several Java APIs to transform Java objects into JSON (look at GSON for example).

You'll have to modify the content type of the response : it's not text/html, but application/json if you use JSON.

Answer 3

As already said jQuery is very good for ajax manipulation.

Another good framework I liked to use was DWR: https://github.com/directwebremoting/dwr

It is quite lighter than jQuery (because only focused on Ajax calls and not components) and very easy to understand.