The Spring MVC-Ajax Sample and its JSON Library

The Spring-MVC sample code is available from the Spring subversion repository at https://src.springframework.org/svn/spring-samples. The idea of this sample is to demonstrate a simple Ajax application that updates an account screen both checking that a user name is available and adding a new account to the application.

The sample, which focuses on the Spring MVC code, is fronted by a JSP that uses JQuery together with a JSON JQuery javascript called ‘json.min.js’, which is somewhat anonymous.

It turns out that this code was written by Douglas Crockford and can be download from https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js and is referenced from the JSON Website. This isn’t, however, the original code, it’s been hacked and had a couple of methods added:

$.fn.serializeObject = function() { etc

$.postJSON = function(url, data, callback) { etc

It could be argued that in a ‘real’ application, it’s not a good idea to modify other people’s libraries as this prevents you from taking and using their updates, but hey, this is only sample code.