Ajax Application Design

Really good articles on ajax fundamentals. One comment I have is that it is not pointed out in Part 2 and 3 that the database access, register.pl, is still in effect. It is also easy to change check-name-exists.pl above to use similar database methods as register.pl users:


#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use diagnostics;
use warnings;
use CGI;
use CGI::Carp;
use DBI;
# ------------------------------------------------------------
# # Connect to the database
# ------------------------------------------------------------
my $dbname = 'test';
my $dbuser = 'gene';
my $dbpassword = '';
my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:dbname=$dbname",
$dbuser, $dbpassword,
{
AutoCommit => 1, RaiseError => 1,
PrintError => 1, ChopBlanks => 1}) ||
print "Error connecting: '$DBI::errstr' ";

# Define the usernames that are taken
# (Use a hash for lookup efficiency)
#my %usernames = ('abc' => 1,
# 'def' => 1,
# 'ghi' => 1,
# 'jkl' => 1);
# ------------------------------------------------------------
my $query = new CGI;
print $query->header("text/plain");
# Get the POST data
my $postdata = $query->param("POSTDATA");
# Get the username
my ($name, $value) = split /=/, $postdata;
my $username = '';
if ($name eq 'username')
{
$username = $value;
}
my $select_sql = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Users WHERE username = ?";
my $select_sth = $dbh->prepare($select_sql);
$select_sth->execute($username);
my ($username_is_taken) = $select_sth->fetchrow_array();

# If this username is defined, say "yes"!
if ($username_is_taken)
{
print "yes";
}
# Otherwise, say "no"!
else
{
print "no";
}

I also change it to use onblur instead of onchange but had to pass a parameter to checkUserName():


function checkUsername(val) {
:
var username = val; //document.forms[0].username.value;
xhr.send("username=" + escape(username));