Rails 3: Simple AJAXy Page updates?

Question

I can\'t believe I\'ve been looking four hours for this simple task, but I have.

In Rails 2.3, I could replace one section of a page with this simple code:

Answer 1

As far as I know, along the same line as the answer above, you can do something like this in your template:

<%= link_to "Update User List", @reload_users_path, :remote => true %>

And in controller, do this:

respond_to do |format|
  format.js {
    render :text => "alert('reloaded')"
  }
end

This way you can have controller "execute" client side JS much the same as as render :update used to do. This is equivalent to doing the following in Rails 2:

render :update do |page|
   page << "alert('reloaded')"
end

Is there any reason why this approach is not advisable?