Phonebook.js – Managing Your jQuery Ajax Soup

With the onset of modern web technologies and the advent of the "MV*" wars, it was pretty much forgotten that a lot of projects aren't in the right place to use these new "auto-ajax" toolsets.  Perhaps they're legacy projects, or maybe they're being built by people who either don't understand or like the MV* approach.  In either case, projets that are just using standard "$.ajax" calls can quickly turn into "soup".  The code becomes bloated and hard to follow, and it's not immediately apparent what's happening when you look at it.

Phonebook.js fixes this by providing a lightweight (1.33kb minified) wrapper around your AJAX calls, allowing you to define a manageable "API consumer" which you can use throughout your project.

// Turn this:
var request = $.ajax({
    url: "/api/users/all",
    type: "get",
    dataType: "json",
    data: {
        "active": true
    }
});

// Into this:
var request = API.users.all();

You can view the project on github.