JSONRequest Proposal
For the last year to two I’ve familiarized myself quite a bit with AJAX and was able to leverage its power in providing a seamless user experience with so-called Web 2.0 style of web development and design. I’ve began AJAX with simple XMLHttpRequest (XHR) to request HTTP data from the server. Then, I’ve stepped up my game and utilized the jQuery Javascript Library to do AJAX. One of the best things I loved was the ability to handle a JSON data type request from the server. Unlike a block of XML or HTML, JSON is so flexible as one is able to return many different types of information such as a status code, status message, and any data along with a HTTP Status Code 200 (OK). I’ve pretty much defaulted to using JSON as the response type for all my AJAX called through jQuery.
At work, while working with a third-party application for generating personalized websites, the lack of information the system provided, I’ve tried using AJAX to request information from another server that can request for more information. Upon discovering that AJAX cannot perform cross-domain requests (Same Origin Policy) due to various security issues that would arise, I’ve found something called JSONP. Although it’s technically not AJAX (it doesn’t use the XMLHttpRequest object), it was a workable hack-ish workaround the limitations of the current state of AJAX techniques using a GET request that returns a JSON object wrapped in a Javascript callback function.
Today, I’ve discovered a proposal by Douglas Crockford for a JSONRequest service that allows cross-domain requests with requests and responses in the form of JSON, minus some of the issues that plagued XMLHttpRequest if it was usable cross-domain. The big one would be that cookies or HTTP Authentication data would not be sent along with the request, so that prevents Cross-Site Request Forgery. Though the proposal has been created nearly three years ago I’m surprised that it hasn’t been implemented in any browsers yet. I hope a future version of Firefox or some browser would implement it and slowly spread its implementation.