"Best" way to integrate Django with an Ajax library

Question

Obviously, horses for courses, but what are some good ways to integrate javascript libraries with one's Django application?

I'm planning on using jQuery, mostly because it seems popular and looks powerful (but I'm open to other suggestions).

Are there python-side libraries that are very helpful or essential? Or is it best simply to create JSON views, and hand-code the javascript (using an appropriate javascript framework)?

I've looked (briefly) at Dajax, but based on the scant documentation, it's not clear that it really gives me very much. I would certainly prefer something with a bit more documentation.

Other answers here suggest that pjax doesn't necessarily work well with many browsers, so that's out.

Edit: Thanks everyone. I'll be looking at tastypie to simplify exposing some json views, and man up to write some javascript by hand (Which having done a tiny bit earlier this year, seems much better than it was in the late 90s).

Answer 1

Remember, Just because it's ajax does not mean you need to return a json dump. You can indeed return a rendered template.

It's true, that the 'right way' is to construct all your tags in javascript, and fill in that data with the json data, but let's face it, that's such a pain in the rump... so much so that they're developing a jquery template language.

You also can't just dump a query set. You need to construct your json data by hand. All these tutorials and suggestions seem to gloss over that fact. From the django docs:

def convert_context_to_json(self, context):
        "Convert the context dictionary into a JSON object"
        # Note: This is *EXTREMELY* naive; in reality, you'll need
        # to do much more complex handling to ensure that arbitrary
        # objects -- such as Django model instances or querysets
        # -- can be serialized as JSON.
        return json.dumps(context)

What I've done is actually write a mixin for the new class based views that renders a choice of templates depending on wether it's an ajax page load or not. I then put the fragment of what I'd want returned in one fragment, and in another wrapper template, extend base.html and include the fragment template.

class AjaxTemplateMixin(TemplateResponseMixin):
    ajax_template_name = None

    def get_template_names(self):
        if self.ajax_template_name and self.request.is_ajax():
            self.template_name = self.ajax_template_name

        return super(AjaxTemplateMixin, self).get_template_names()    

This allows me to only write the template once, and then without having to manually construct dom elements in javascript. It's very little extra work, and especially if you're not writing an api, it's the way to go.

Answer 2

I would suggest that you simply create your own javascript and AJAX views. Ruby on Rails long had the opposite problem: forcing people to do AJAX in a certain way, and it was always a point of conflict for people. Recently, they finally realized their folly and decoupled AJAX from the framework so you can easily use whatever library you like.

This is a feature of Django. It may seem more difficult, but trust me, it ends up being infinitely better having control end-to-end.