AppFuse project is rewriting my URLs. How? Why?

Question

I created a project using AppFuse (which I am not at all familiar with). I find that when the page http://machine/foo contains a link like this: <a href="/bar"> the browser does not navigate to http://machine/bar. Instead it issues a request for http://machine/bar?ajax=true and then the browser appears to have been navigated to http://machine/foo#bar?ajax=true. I suspect that this is caused by some library they have included, perhaps something allowing it to load the content section via ajax without reloading navigation and sidebars. Which might be useful or it might not. First of all, I want to understand WHAT is doing this, and how to turn it off (how to use it might also turn out to be useful).

Does anyone recognize this behavior?

Answer 1

I'll happily accept a better answer if someone can provide one, but for posterity's sake, here is what I have learned:

The functionality is provided by some Javascript found in src/main/webapp/scripts/global.js. It decorates URLs found in the page to replace them with ajax invocations. Apparently the reason is to avoid the need to re-generate and re-render headers, footers, and navigation that are not changing. I do not fully understand how it works (or, more importantly, why it wasn't working for me), but knowing that the behavior is generated from that file it is possible to determine it by careful reading of the source code.

Also, some documentation can be found here.