alex.mullr.net/blog

Since I first started teaching myself PHP as well as GET and POST methods back in May to throw together a scrobbler for Last.fm, I’ve wanted to update it to make it a little more… AJAX-y (as the kids are saying today).

Yesterday, I started looking into the best way to go about doing this and came across XMLHttpRequest for the first time. Sitting here reading about it, the grin on my face grew: this thing is absolutely perfect.

XMLHttpRequest is a JavaScript object that was created by Microsoft and adopted by Mozilla. You can use it to easily retrieve data via HTTP. Despite its name, it can be used for more than just XML documents, e.g. for JSON.

XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is an API that can be used by JavaScript and other web browser scripting languages to transfer XML and other text data between a web server and a browser.

My plan at the moment is to update the old scrobbler to make it all pretty and more friendly, but I keep on running into problems. For example, XMLHttpRequest only allows data transfer across a single domain name (I might not have described that well, but that’s the case). A search reveals that this is a fairly widely known thing/issue/whatever, and I’m looking at ways to get around it at the moment. As I’m on shared hosting and don’t have access to the server configuration, I’m going to try doing it via PHP. This LiveJournal post is also applicable to the situation.

Anyway, that’s the stuff I’m getting on with at the moment. Now, back to some coding…