The new windowName module (dojox.io.windowName) now includes support for resource authorization as Neil Roberts described in his article on xauth. Now the windowName module can be used with a window.name enabled resources for simple (direct) access as well resources that require an authorization step.

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Several new technologies are coming out for accessing resources from other sites. IE8 will include the XDomainRequest and the W3C is finishing the access control specification for enabling cross-site access for XMLHttpRequest, which will probably be implemented in next major release of all browsers, including Firefox. However, it will certainly take a long time for these new technologies to become pervasive enough to use them reliably and exclusively. Is there any way to leverage this technology immediately when these browsers are released? Yes! With Dojo’s new XHR plugin system, you can start making cross-site requests right away, using the new technologies when available, and a proxy server as a fallback, all while using the familiar dojo.xhr* methods. Your source code can still use this simple API while the registry can handle choosing the appropriate underlying transports for the situation.

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Google and Yahoo have JavaScript APIs that let you perform searches. Wikipedia has a JavaScript API that lets you grab data from its pages. These APIs can be accessed cross-domain with a transport method known as JSONP. JSONP works by allowing you add a script tag to your page which points to a URL on their server. The server outputs JavaScript that will call a method (defined as part of the query string in the URL), passing it JSON-formatted data.

You’ll notice that these services are read-only. I don’t currently know of any cross-domain JavaScript APIs that allow you to write data in any meaningful way. An example of this sort of data would be a way, through JavaScript, to update your status on a social networking web site.

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