I've been using a couple RESTful APIs for server to server interactions recently and am now thinking about communicating directly with a RESTful API via javascript from within a web browser in my web application.
This would mean using ajax within a web page to talk to my web server using GET, POST, PUT and DELETE requests and the server responding with appropriate http status codes and non-html data (probably json)
Is this generally considered good practice for a web application and why?
It doesn't matter if you are consuming an RPC API or RESTful API from the ajax standpoint, but generally, you can think of a RESTful API as a well-organized, well-namespaced set of remote procedural calls.
Is this generally considered good practice for a web application and why?
It is useful to do things this way because you don't need to duplicate code in order to have regular CRUD operations across multiple data objects.
Another thing to consider is that if you have a uniform naming convention of API calls that you can write AJAX functions to interact with, you will write and maintain much less code over time in your javascript side of the application, assuming you don't do anything weird in your code.
An example of when / how this would be a good practice would be if you had written a base method designed to automatically determine your AJAX url depending on what you're doing and where you are, and it automatically determines what POST method to use depending on the type of operation... then you literally write one ajax function, and apply it to things rather than write fully separate ajax methods per action item.
