I share the thoughts and concerns of creating views that are not obstructed by any code, especially JavaScript, at all. I have been applying the techniques you describe here for a long while and can give my testimony that they get their job done!

Now the only problem I am seeing in this code is the lack of flexibility towards non-JavaScript enabled browsers. What if someone tries to reach your code without JavaScript? Let’s put it into a more realistic world: what if you are specifying an API?

In my opinion your code could use some header detection to determine whether the client wants a JSON answer (e.g. if it is an AJAX client), html (e.g. a simple post done by a form that informs your data was submitted properly), etc. Luckily, and as you may already be aware of, this could be achieved by using the respond_to provided in rails as follows:

def create
@message = Message.create(:author => params[:author], :message => params[:message])
respond_to do |format|
format.json {render :partial => ‘message’, :object => @message}
format.html
end
end

Even though I particularly dislike sending raw html through a JSON request -I think it should be a proper JSON object- this is a better approach to handle both kinds of requests nicely.

I understand the purpose of the example was to prove how unobstrusive JavaScript coding can be done. However, we should not forget that a similar concept should be bore in mind when defining the endpoints of our applications.

Regards,
Darío