11.3. A del.icio.us Example

Back in Chapter 2 I showed clients in various languages for a REST-RPC hybrid service: the API for the del.icio.us social bookmarking application. Though I implemented my own, fully RESTful version of that service in Chapter 7, I’m going to bring the original service out one more time to demonstrate a client written in JavaScript. Like most JavaScript programs, this one runs in a web browser, and since it’s a web service client, that makes it an Ajax application. Although simple, this program brings up almost all of the advantages of and problems with Ajax that I discuss in this chapter.

The first part of the application is the user interface, implemented in plain HTML. This is quite different from my other del.icio.us clients, which ran on the command line and wrote their data to standard output (see Example 11-1).