Ajax Forms: submit_to_remote reliable?

I am trying to implement some ajax forms and I need to have multiple buttons that submit the whole form.

I initially tried having two submit buttons and I was planning to read the value of the button in the controller to see which one was clicked, and then call the appropriate action. There seems to be a well known issue with Ajax forms that only the first button gets serialized so you'll always see the same action. There is a workaround but it's a little ugly..

I found submit_to_remote which I could use to submit the form data to different actions, but the book I have says that this function is unpredictable and shouldn't be used. I can't find any other place that mentions this.

Is this still true? Is it unreliable to use submit_to_remote? Is there a better way?