The other day I wrote some AJAX for a Django app that i have been working on.
I come from Ruby on Rails, so I haven\'t done much in the way of raw JS.
So bas
No matter what, you're going to need at least two things:
Your javascript code to make the call (you have this)
Server side code to handle the request (this is your view and url-config)
There is absolutely nothing "hacky" about this.
The third thing, your template file, is optional - but is generally good practice. You want to separate your markup from the code, for many reasons.
So I think you've got the right idea. Carry on.