Is it possible to create client-side only mashups with javascript?

Question

Hi everyone

I have been tinkering with javasript (jquery) all day. I want to create a personal little mashup that grabs the page contents of a few local music venues, reformats their data, and presents in a single webpage.

I thought I could be clever and load them as iframes, hide the iframes, and access their contents through the DOM and javascript. Apparently the cross-site security permission holds true for this approach as well - one cannot alter the contents of an iframe.

My question is: is it possible to create website mashups purely with client side code? Assume jsonp / rss api's are not an option, and I wish to only work with raw page contents. I thought about setting up an AppEngine project to handle this on the serverside, but that is way too much work for a weekend project.

Thank you for any advice

Answer 1

Not really. You could put the mashup code on the client side, but to access all the target pages you would have to proxy requests to them through your own server to avoid the Same-Origin Policy restrictions. At which point you're no better off than if you'd just done it on the server side.

(You could do it as non-web client-side code, eg. a Firefox extension, but of course that limits your audience.)