Today I made some more progress on my startup project. Today’s task was to research JSONP. JSONP is a method of padding the JSON data with a function call as a way to work around the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing restriction. It is really difficult to find any good examples of using JSONP, but I eventually figured out how to use the Flickr API to get my callback function working. My service is going to support JSONP. This is a simple matter of accepting a query string parameter for the callback name and then surrounding the JSON data with the callback function before returning the JSON string. One of the useful aspects of Yahoo! Pipes was that it gave you the ability to add a callback to any API you choose to route through your pipe. So even if an API did not support JSONP you could still use it. There is nothing terribly brilliant or original in my startup idea but I can’t find anyone offering this useful service.
I also discovered that I may not need a dedicated web server but I will need Internet Information Services (IIS) 7. My web site is running on a server that has Microsoft-IIS/6.0 so I cannot add a custom header in the web.config file.
