Making an AJAX request to another server

Question

I have AJAX code where if you request an AJAX call to remote server the request fails:

function loadXMLDoc() {
  if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
    // code for         


        

Answer 1

It looks like you have bumped into the same origin policy. You have to use a relative path instead of your absolute http://www.google.com path.

As one possible workaround, you could set up a very simple reverse proxy (with mod_proxy if you are using Apache). This would allow you to use relative paths in your AJAX request, while the HTTP server would be acting as a proxy to any "remote" location.

The fundamental configuration directive to set up a reverse proxy in mod_proxy is the ProxyPass. You would typically use it as follows:

ProxyPass     /web-services/     http://third-party.com/web-services/

In this case, the browser would be requesting /web-services/service.xml but the server would serve this by acting as a proxy to http://third-party.com/web-services/service.xml.

Another common workaround would be to use JSONP.