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JavaScript / Python interaction in Linux without a REST framework?

I'm working on some changes to a page that needs to retrieve information from some files under /proc so the page can display version information to the user. Currently, the page is generated entirely by the Python script, which allows me to just read the file and put everything in the page at creation time.
However, this led to the issue that the version numbers wouldn't update when a new version of the software was uploaded. I don't want to regenerate the page every time a new package is installed, so I made the main page static and want to instead just query the information from a Python script and return it to the page to populate the page when loaded.
The Python scripts are set up as CGI and have sudo access, so there's no issue with them retrieving those files. However, if I wanted to use something like AJAX to call the Python script, is there any way I could return the data without using a REST framework such as Flask or Django? The application needs to be lightweight and preferably not rely on a new framework.
Is there a way I can do this with vanilla JavaScript and Python?

Ok, so the solution was fairly simple, I just made a few syntactical errors that led to it not working the first few times I tried it.
So the request looked like this:
window.onload = function() {
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.onreadystatechange = function() {
if((this.readyState == 4) && (this.status == 200)) {
var response = JSON.parse(this.responseText);
// Do stuff with the JSON here...
}
};
xhr.open("GET", scriptURL, true);
xhr.send();
}
From there, the Python script simply needed to do something like this to return JSON data containing my version numbers:
import sys, cgi, json
result = {}
result['success'] = True
result['message'] = "The command completed successfully"
d = {}
... write version information to the 'd' map ...
result['data'] = d
sys.stdout.write("Content-Type: text/plain\n\n")
sys.stdout.write(json.dumps(result))
sys.stdout.write("\n")
sys.stdout.close()
The most persistent problem that took me forever to find was I forgot a closing quotation in my script tag, which caused the whole page to not load.

POST data with ajax

I'm trying to save a few lines of text in a textarea with ajax targeting a classic asp file.
I'm not sure how to use ajax when when it comes to sending data with POST method and NOT using jQuery, didn't find any questions concerning this here either, no duplicate intended.
Ajax function:
function saveDoc() {//disabled
var xhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
var note = document.getElementById("note");
xhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (xhttp.readyState == 4 && xhttp.status == 200) {
document.getElementById("0").innerHTML = xhttp.responseText;
}
};
xhttp.open("POST", "saveNote.asp", true);
xhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
xhttp.send(note);
ASP Classic:
set fs=Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set f=fs.OpenTextFile("c:\inetasp\1.txt",8,true)
dim note
note = RequestForm("note")
f.Write(note)
f.Close
Response.Write("Works.");
set f=nothing
set fs=nothing
I'm aware there might be a lot wrong with the .asp since i couldn't find any specific info about how to handle ajax requests with Classic ASP correctly.
Any suggestions on how to make this work without jQuery are welcome.

I cannot test your code as I don't have a backend running on my machine right now. But I can already tell you a few things:
you are calling xhttp.send(note); but your note is a DOM element. It should be a string with a querystring format.
in your server side code you call RequestForm is it a custom function you have previously defined ? The usual syntax is Request.Form
Hope it can help

Making an ASP.NET MVC Ajax call with the use of Javascript

First off, thanks for taking the time to read.
I'm trying to delve into ASP.NET MVC at the moment, however i currently have no wish to use any type of JavaScript framework, so please, don't tell me how much easier it would be etc, in your answer.
I currently have a Javascript function that successfully makes an AJAX call, however i am struggling to understand why no values are being returned from the request.
The function is as follows.
function ajaxRequestUser(num) {
var ajax;
try {
ajax = new XMLHttpRequest();
} catch(e) {
try {
ajax = new ActiveXObject(Msxml2.XMLHTTP);
} catch(e){
alert('old browser');
}
}
ajax.readystatechange = function () {
if (ajax.readyState == 4) {
var queryResult = ajax.responseText;
if (!queryResult) {
alert('No Information.');
} else {
alert(queryResult);
}
}
}
var requestString = "?user="+num;
ajax.open("GET", "/Users/GetUser" + requestString, true);
ajax.send(null);
}
The function is called via a separate function that simply does some UI modifications to allow for the display of the data.
The alerts are there at this point, because i was not receiving any data back from the call and i was testing to see if that part of the code was being hit at all (Don't go into the differences between Synchronous and Asynchronous.). No matter how long i waited the data being returned was not being returned, after breaking through the actual server side c#, i saw the data being sent back, but it was just never being received. Is there something in the code that was done wrong? Or am i going about receiving the inbound data in the wrong way?

I have found the issue related to my code, and it is solely an error based around the declaration of my ajax.event where the event is onreadystatechange as opposed to readystatechange

Problem with making a simple JS XmlHttpRequest call

Edit: Maybe I made the question more complex than it should. My questions is this: How do you make API calls to a server from JS.
I have to create a very simple client that makes GET and POST calls to our server and parses the returned XML. I am writing this in JavaScript, problem is I don't know how to program in JS (started to look into this just this morning)!
As n initial test, I am trying to ping to the Twitter API, here's the function that gets called when user enters the URL http://api.twitter.com/1/users/lookup.xml and hits the submit button:
function doRequest() {
var req_url, req_type, body;
req_url = document.getElementById('server_url').value;
req_type = document.getElementById('request_type').value;
alert("Connecting to url: " + req_url + " with HTTP method: " + req_type);
req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.open(req_type, req_url, false, "username", "passwd");// synchronous conn
req.onreadystatechange=function() {
if (req.readyState == 4) {
alert(req.status);
}
}
req.send(null);
}
When I run this on FF, I get a
Access to restricted URI denied" code: "1012
error on Firebug. Stuff I googled suggested that this was a FF-specific problem so I switched to Chrome. Over there, the second alert comes up, but displays 0 as HTTP status code, which I found weird.
Can anyone spot what the problem is? People say this stuff is easier to use with JQuery but learning that on top of JS syntax is a bit too much now.

For security reasons, you cannot use AJAX to request a file from a different domain.
Since your Javascript isn't running on http://api.twitter.com, it cannot request files from http://api.twitter.com.
Instead, you can write server-side code on your domain to send you the file.

Ajax call from Bookmarklet

I am trying to create a bookmarklet that, upon clicking, would request some information from the user (a url and a couple other fields in this case) and then send that data to a php page on my server and then display the result.
I would like to do an Ajax call for this so that I don't actually redirect to the new page, just get the data but I assume I would run into the "Same Origin Policy" limitation of Ajax.... is there any known way of basically doing the same thing?
Also, what would be the best way to pass the parameters? I already have a mechanism in place to recieve the parameters as a post message from a form...is there any way I could just reuse this?

You can set a bookmarklet by create a bookmark and add that piece of code below in location, but, according to same origin policy limitation, that will only work when the current tab is on the same location, here www.google.com.
If I've understand well your needs, that should be ok for your problem.
var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.open("GET", "http://www.google.com", true);
request.onreadystatechange = function() {
var done = 4, ok = 200;
if (request.readyState == done && request.status == ok) {
if (request.responseText) {
alert(request.responseText);
}
}
};
request.send(null);
I don't know if POST would work.

You won't be able to do a post, but a GET will work fine. If you're using something like jQuery, it will simply create a script tag with a src URL which would send the data you are looking to submit.
You will have to return JSON style data.
See: http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/jQuery.getJSON
Alternatively, your bookmarklet could create an iframe on the page, and that could do you work of submitting the data (you could use post then) if you weren't looking to communicate between the iframe and the page itself, but instead just use user input to submit.