Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I'm in the middle of the final stages of coding a hefty AJAX-based mashup application, that works with multiple sites and services (five at the last count). I have to say, Yahoo! Pipes makes the job a lot easier, as it lets me take an RSS feed and render it as JSON - which means I can do a cross-domain mashup using the JSON callback hack.

It took me quite a while to realise that Pipes was the fix I needed. If I wasn't doing it all hosted on a Software as Service platform, I'd be using Flex or writing my own proxy code to deal with the cross domain issues. I toyed with a Dojo approach, but its cross domain hack requires more control of the originating service than I had - seeing as it's a weather feed that just takes a URL with latitude and longitude. The Flash proxy approach might have worked if the remote site had a crossdomain.xml file, but it didn't...

Still, I'm pleased that I have finally broken the back of a problem that's been bugging me for the last few days.

So that's Salesforce.com as a data source and host, Google Local for geocoding, Google maps for mapping and information display, Weatherbug for location-based weather RSS, and Pipes to convert RSS into JSON. An interesting combination, showing that Web 2.0 is as much a business tool as a consumer technology.