Extending Ajax capabilities

The jQuery Ajax framework is powerful, as we've seen, but even so there are times when we might want to change the way it behaves. Unsurprisingly, it offers multiple hooks that can be used by plugins to give the framework brand new capabilities.

Data type converters

In Chapter 6, Sending Data with Ajax, we saw that the $.ajaxSetup() function allows us to change the defaults used by $.ajax(), thus potentially affecting many Ajax operations with a single statement. This same function can also be used to add to the range of data types that $.ajax() can request and interpret.

As an example, we can add a converter that understands the YAML data format. YAML (http://www.yaml.org/) is a popular data representation with implementations in many programming languages. In our case, script needs to interact with an alternative format such as this; jQuery allows us to build compatibility for them it into the native Ajax functions.

A simple YAML file containing jQuery method categories...