[uf-rest] Introducing JAHAH

[David Janes -- BlogMatrix]

I came to this group by a slightly strange path -- I wanted a way of 
providing webservices that others could load into their own webpages. 
"traditional" AJAX, if there is such a beast, cannot do this because of 
limitations with cross site scripting.

I mulled this over for a while and discovered at Christmas time that one 
can use the SCRIPT element to dynamically load scripts from anywhere. I 
had also been looking at a technology called JSON which has huge 
replacement to be a widely used net transport language, as it's much 
easier to deal with that XML. JSON led me to Bob Ippolito's JSONP, which 
lets me combine the SCRIPT with JSON with a callback.

Finally, looking back through my notes, I revisited AHAH which provided 
an easy method for producers and consumers to use HTML in "AJAX-y" 
applications.

Combining them all together, I've produced JAHAH (pronounced the German 
way).

- it allows cross site scripting
- if the "jsonp" parameter is not passed to the webservice, HTML 
documents are returned
- if it is, a simple JSON payload is returned with "html" holding the 
HTML document; arbitrary other data can be added to the payload

I've written a deeper description here [1], the official home (please 
don't like to the temporary redirect) and I'm providing code samples, 
JAHAH webservices for extracting HTML from files or looking at RSS 
feeds, and all my sources. If you'd like to publicly comment or link to 
it on a blog, please also link to [2]. My code also builds on Ippolito's 
MochiKit.

Regards, etc...
David

[1] http://www.blogmatrix.com/tools/jahah/
[2] http://blog.davidjanes.com/mtarchives/2006_01.html#003498