Browser-server transmission via AJAX

We can enhance the user experience by loading new content directly into 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). For XML delivery, we'll also grab our buildXml function from the Converting an object to XML and back again recipe, converting it to a simple module (just like we did with our profiles object in the previous recipe):

module.exports = function buildXml(rootObj, rootName) {
//..buildXml function code
}

We'll save this as buildXml.js and place it in a folder with a copy of our...