When Marko (@markowenzel) and I started to plan our first iPhone app codename “ShiftCal”, we met and used prototypes to get a feeling for the Interface we wished Apple provided built into Calendar.app. The prototypes for the app which later would be dubbed “Calendar Paste” were really fun to make.
I struggled with Ajax form calls in Ruby on Rails for some time now. Because I seem to be anal retentive, I insist the server should respond with HTTP status code “400 Bad Request” or “424 Unprocessable Entity” when form submission turns out to be full with invalid data. Responding with “200 OK” doesn’t make any sense when there was an error on the client side, like an empty or otherwise invalid form. That’s what HTTP codes are for: to comminicate how it went and what happened. Also, we web developers are creating publicly visible Web Services and APIs here, so they should conform to the most basic standards of the transfer protocol we’re using, am I right?