What's the point of the X-Requested-With header?

Question

JQuery and other frameworks add the following header:

X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest

Why is this needed? Why would a server wa

Answer 1

Some frameworks are using this header to detect xhr requests e.g. grails spring security is using this header to identify xhr request and give either a json response or html response as response.

Most Ajax libraries (Prototype, JQuery, and Dojo as of v2.1) include an X-Requested-With header that indicates that the request was made by XMLHttpRequest instead of being triggered by clicking a regular hyperlink or form submit button.

Source: http://grails-plugins.github.io/grails-spring-security-core/guide/helperClasses.html