posted 15 years ago
AJAX is entirely independent of REST; a RESTful application can be made to use AJAX or not, as your needs indicate. Rails 2 has added some features that make adding this sort of dynamic behavior to your application even easier than it has been in the past, however. Chapter 2 of my book deals with this in part, and you see hints of it in some of the projects that follow.
Essentially, the idea is that an AJAX request is just a standard HTTP request with a specific format. Rails allows you to respond differently to different request formats automatically, which means that you can layer a RESTful web service on top of a standard, HTML-based web application very easily.