Exceptionally frustrated. Part of the biggest problem I have with the XMLHttpRequest is the security limitations of the browser. I can’t run a bit of code on this blog and pull data from my other domains using XMLHttpRequest. The data source has to exist on the same domain as the running script.

I have a few ideas of how to get around this. But I’m still learning a few things about browser security models. Its hard going from building something that happens entirely server side to now blurring between local and remote. In the past I’ve done very simple code without really understanding the workings of it. People that remember the original version of de-generationx.net that had a search box that performed much the same way Google Suggest does, but was on my site a few months before Google Suggest was even leaked to the public. :-)

Thing with that was that I was ultimately following a recipe to put it together, and the script was running in the browser on the same domain that the data was being pulled from. What I’m trying to achieve at the moment is significantly light years beyond that, and I cannot find anywhere that has something even slightly similar. Well, I tell a lie. One company offers similar as a hosted service for which there is no code available. It all happens on their server and is then imported when the page is drawn initially.

I do have to admit that the biggest saving grace in all of this is that the Mozilla Foundation has absolutely fantastic documentation for pretty much everything about their browser. Their documentation of the DOM and JavaScript is outstanding and the easiest to search through I have used in a long time. Microsoft, Sun, Cisco, Novell, Redhat and all the other big vendors could really take a lesson or 50 from Mozilla’s knowledgebase.

Anyway, thats enough of this for now. Back to the frustration. Its 2am and I’m not going to be able to sleep until I figure a work-around for this security model problem.