Cross-domain Mash-up using Google Feed API

If you want to retrieve cross-domain content via AJAX/JavaScript to build a mash-up client, browsers might restrict these calls upon security reasons.

Digging through the resources on the Web, you might figure out that there are various approaches. I decided against any server-side processing of the request as I did not want to make an extra call to the my server. Also any jQuery plugin related approach would not work at the moment due to recent unavailability of jQuery plugins.

Looking for an alternative approach I came along the Google Feed API. Basically, it allows you to download any public Atom or RSS feed and consuming it in your JavaScript.

Once you got your API key which is based on the domain you want to call the API from, you can immediately  start using it.  The key is valid for all pages within this domain. Usage of the API includes adding the script your head of the HTML, loading the API using Google Loader’s load()call and finally hooking up your code as call-back in the setOnLoadCallback function. The feed is then provided either as JSON or as XML by the Google Feed API and can be easily used within you code without any cross-domain restrictions.