joomla 2.5 ajax api

Question

I would like to setup some little ajax support for my joomla page, in detail: I would like to send logging messages from the frontend to the backend via ajax and store them in database.

In drupal this can be done by adding a path and a callback inside a module, so how can this be achieved in joomla 2.5, so that there is an url like:

http://www.domain.com/log which leads to a function call?

Greetings..

Answer 1

The proper way would be to create a component to handle the call, but as you write most of the time it seems a bit overkill for just a module. Another way would be to create a standalone php-file that uses the Joomla-library. This file could then easily be called from wherever you like. It's like a mini-version of Joomla with the advantage of having all libraries available:

define( 'DS', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR );
if (!defined('JPATH_BASE')){
    define('JPATH_BASE', '..'.DS.'..'.DS.'..');
}
define('JPATH_LIBRARIES', JPATH_BASE . DS . 'libraries');
require_once JPATH_LIBRARIES . DS . 'import.php';
$var = JRequest::getVar('my_var');

To access the DB-object, you would need to manually set the options to the DB-object since this file won't access the configuration files (you can program this of course).

$option = array(); //prevent problems  
$option['driver']   = 'mysql';            // Database driver name 
$option['host']     = 'db.myhost.com';    // Database host name 
$option['user']     = 'myuser';       // User for database authentication 
$option['password'] = 'mypass';   // Password for database authentication 
$option['database'] = 'bigdatabase';      // Database name 
$option['prefix']   = 'abc_';             // Database prefix (may be empty)  
$db = & JDatabase::getInstance( $option );