koala-moon

In a previous post I was refreshing my memory with vanilla JavaScript  after years of jQuery-ing, especially AJAX request and the

XMLHttpRequest()

My eyes rolled when I was reading more about it then  I found fetch()  ( I know its been about since 2015 and now almost universally adopted).

Fetch does what XMLHttpRequest does but in a more elegant way and DOES NOT need additional libraries as it is bundled with JavaScript. It also makes use of “promises” .

const url = "https://randomuser.me/api/?results=10";

fetch(url)
.then(function(response) {
 return response.json();
})
.then(function(data) {
 console.log(data.results);
})
.catch(function() {
 console.log("Booo");
});

The above code queries the URL, then parses the string as JSON, then does something with the data.

It also catches errors.

Good eh?

Its looks to be easy to expand and do all manner of fetching. For example submitting a form

var form = new FormData(commentForm);
fetch( url, { method: "POST", body: form })

You can then chain .then() promises to get the desired outcomes.

For more information

A quick introduction video from Google

From Google Working with the Fetch API

Jake Archibald’s post Thats so Fetch

Scotch post The Fetch API

I learnt this stuff years ago but with the rise of jQuery I like many others had become lazy. Add the fact that so many browsers handled things slightly different going down the library route had its benefits.

It is 2017 and things have improved many jQuery(ish) approaches have been adopted by Javascript and browsers have become more similar.

So here goes. First off a GET request to retrieve a Chuck Norris joke

<script>
var url = "http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random";
var request = new XMLHttpRequest();

request.open('GET', url, true);

request.onload = function() {
 if (request.status >= 200 && request.status < 400) {
 // Success!

printJokes(request.responseText);

} else {
 // We reached our target server, but it returned an error
 console.log('There was a problem. Status:' + request.status);

}
};

request.onerror = function() {
 console.log('There was a problem!');
};

request.send();


var printJokes = function(jokes){

JSON.parse(jokes, (key, value) => {
 key == 'joke' ?
 console.log(value) : ''
 });

}
</script>