avoiding iframes, but having some iframe like activity in Rails

Question

I have two sites, my main site and a help site with documentation. The main site is rails but the other is simple a wordpress like blog. Currently I have it being pulled into the main site with an iframe, but is there a good way to pull in the html from the other site as some sort of cross-domain (sub-domain actually) partial? Or should I just stick with what works?

Answer 1

If the data sources were all on the same domain, you would be able to utilize straight AJAX to fetch your supplemental content and graft it onto your page. But, since the data is from different domains, the same origin security policy built into web browsers will prevent that from working.

A popular work around is called JSONP, which will let you fetch the data from any cooperating server. Your implementation might look something like this (using jQuery):

$.getJSON(
  "http://my.website.com/pageX?callback=?",
  function(data) { 
    $("#help").append(data) 
  } 
)

The only hitch is that the data returned by your server must be wrapped as a javascript function call. For example, if your data was:

<h1>Topic Foo</h1>

Then your server must respond to the JSONP request like this:

callbackFunction("<h1>Topic Foo</h1>")