A Working Follow Button with Ajax

Although our user following implementation is complete as it stands, we have one bit of polish left to add before starting work on the status feed. You may have noticed in Section 11.2.4 that both the create and destroy actions in the Relationships controller simply redirect back to the original profile. In other words, a user starts on a profile page, follows the user, and is immediately redirected back to the original page. It is reasonable to ask why the user needs to leave that page at all.

            This is exactly the problem solved by Ajax, which allows web pages to send requests asynchronously to the server without leaving the page.9 Because the practice of adding Ajax to web forms is quite common, Rails makes Ajax easy to implement. Indeed, updating the follow/unfollow form partials is trivial: Just change

to

and Rails automagically uses Ajax.10 The updated partials appear in Listing 11.35 and Listing 11.36.