ajax

I've been struggling to get Project Auriga to set HTTP Auth from a nice pretty login form, and think I have it working.

What follows is a very technical discussion--if you're a business reader, you should probably skip this post...

HTTP Auth is a specific mechanism for handling authentication. HTTP Auth is built into Apache and IIS, and so the server can handle authentication purely through configuration, offering many different back ends for storing the data.

We're doing a fair amount of AJAX development these days, and ran into a problem with the REST convention. Thought I'd put my notes here in case somebody else runs into this.

REST, short for "Representational State Transfer" is a new-ish approach to managing state in a web application. With PHP, you typically manage state using its session features, which pass a cookie back and forth from the browser. Then the server needs to store values for each browser session, mirroring in some fashion the data in the browser with a cache on the server.