Cross-site Ajax (from OSCON 2006)

Kevin Yank, SitePoint’s “reporter in the field” at this year’s OSCON has a new post on the SitePoint Web Tech blog with information and his impressions about a talk given by Joseph Smarr, a Plaxo developer on cross-site Ajax.
Mashups, if you’ve been living under a rock, are web applications built by combining services provided by several specialized web applications, typically using AJAX as the glue. One of the main challenges faced by developers of mashups is the same-origin policy, which prevents JavaScript on one site from contacting other sites as a security measure. For mashups to really work, developers need to find a way around that restriction.
Kevin talks about some of the solutions that have been found to the problem - a server-side proxy, a Flash application proxy, JSON-P - but all have issues surrounding their use. They don’t quite fit in elegantly with the rest of the strong, flexible code around them. So, is there a solution? Does Plaxo have the answer? They might, but it’s still a bit of a work in progress. As Kevin calls it, it’s a “Javascript wormhole”, a method to tunnel through pages when a service is called and closed when done. There’s even a suggestion of how it might flow, using iframes and callbacks to make it happen. There are still issues surrounding it (not just in its creation, but in its use), but things are looking brighter.

Cross-site Ajax (from OSCON 2006)

Kevin Yank, SitePoint’s “reporter in the field” at this year’s OSCON has a new post on the SitePoint Web Tech blog with information and his impressions about a talk given by Joseph Smarr, a Plaxo developer on cross-site Ajax.

Mashups, if you’ve been living under a rock, are web applications built by combining services provided by several specialized web applications, typically using AJAX as the glue. One of the main challenges faced by developers of mashups is the same-origin policy, which prevents JavaScript on one site from contacting other sites as a security measure. For mashups to really work, developers need to find a way around that restriction.

Kevin talks about some of the solutions that have been found to the problem - a server-side proxy, a Flash application proxy, JSON-P - but all have issues surrounding their use. They don’t quite fit in elegantly with the rest of the strong, flexible code around them.

So, is there a solution? Does Plaxo have the answer? They might, but it’s still a bit of a work in progress. As Kevin calls it, it’s a “Javascript wormhole”, a method to tunnel through pages when a service is called and closed when done. There’s even a suggestion of how it might flow, using iframes and callbacks to make it happen. There are still issues surrounding it (not just in its creation, but in its use), but things are looking brighter.


July 27th, 2006

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