Description

The fast ajax system is a lightweight, highly specified, drupal bootstraper that is aimed at minimizing the render time of ajax callbacks.

Files

• fastajax.php

Installation / Warning

Warning!
This was written for Project Opus which runs on a 4.6.x codebase. I doubt this will work with 4.7! If you want to convert it over to 4.7 feel free ;-).

Installation is as simple as copying the fastajax.php.txt file into the root of your Drupal installation and renaming it to fastajax.php.

Disclaimer Part II!
This is code and code only. The file fastajax.php will not make your Drupal installation better or faster. In fact without harnessing its power in your module it won't help you at all :-P. To use fastajax you must write your programs to use it.

Ok, Moving on..

Dataflow

Some form or object somewhere in the site uses an AJAX callback... Instead of writing up some standard drupal callback to get your data (ie: mymod/ajax_callback') you can use the hook_fastajax() instead. Here's how it works:

• Your javascript code specifies a callback of the form: /fastajax.php?callback=YOUR_MODULE_NAME&op=AN_OPERATION&var1=val1&var2=val2....
• A user does an action that hits the callback.
• fastajax.php fires up, only loading the drupal essential 'bootstrap.inc'.
• fastajax ONLY loads your modules, and your modules alone! It tries this in the following order:
  • modules/YOUR_MODULE_NAME.module then
  • modules/YOUR_MODULE_NAME/YOUR_MODULE_NAME.module
• If it suceeds, it then tries to run your hook_fastajax($op, $vars)
• Your hook_fastajax renders up some html and returns the output.
• fastajax.php prints the rendered output in record time!

Example hook_fastajax implementation that might be used to render an "autocompleter" search to find users.

That callback can be hit via the following address:

• fastajax.php?callback=user&op=user_name_starts_with

The search_string can be sent via POST or GET. If it was comming from a standard drupal form you might need to modify the code above something similar to

Security Notes

Fastajax.php is secured by greedily escaping strings. The only allowed chars in the callback parameter are A-Za-z0-9_\.

If you have further security concerns feel free to voice them.

Hopefully thats enough to get the idea across!

James Andres
Lead Developer
www.projectopus.com