mpAjax

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/*! mpAjax (multi-part Ajax responses) v0.3.4 (c) Kyle Simpson MIT License */

The concept behind mpAjax is to extend the frameworks' Ajax functionality so that it can parse an Ajax response formatted as multi-part, sending each part to a separate response handler.

The motivation is that many Ajax requests require multiple types of content (like some JSON, some HTML, and some CSS), and it's inefficient to convert or represent any of those text formats as one of the other formats. By the server simply sending back multiple parts, one for each type of content appropriate for the response, the client-side JavaScript can simply listen for each response part with a separate handler appropriate to that type of content, simplifying code and improving efficiency of transfer.

mpAjax is "backwards-compatible", meaning that Ajax responses which are not multi-part formatted will transparently pass through as normal Ajax response handling. Only an Ajax response that is multi-part formatted will be parsed and separated.

A multi-part response might look like this:

!!!!!!=_NextPart_411426488
Content-Type: text/html

<div>Hello, I'm some HTML markup, and I can use " characters natively 
	with no problems.</div>


!!!!!!=_NextPart_2106560908
Content-Type: application/json

{"greeting":"Hello","name":"I'm JSON, natively without any 
	transformations or escaping!"}

And to set up response handlers for each "part" of this response, the code (for jQuery) might look this:

jQuery.get(
   "http://some.tld/something",
   {
      "text/html": handle_html,
      "application/json": handle_json
   }
);