The first post on my cross site ajax plugin for Prototype (1.5.0) was received with great enthusiasm. It was very nice to see my own work on the great Ajaxian website and the delicious front page. Since that post the quality of the plug-in has improved quite a bit. Especially cross browser compatibility improved. I made a test page to evaluate this; have a look to test your own browser. Furthermore some 14 screen shots show that the compatibility is good.
Here the new version: Download the cross site ajax plugin.
The syntax remains exactly the same:
new Ajax.Request(url, {
method: 'GET',
crossSite: true,
onLoading: function() {
//things to do at the start
},
onSuccess: function(transport) {
//things to do when everything goes well
},
onFailure: function(transport) {
//things to do when we encounter a failure
}
});
Cross Browser Compatibility
First of all thanks to Kris Kowal and Gary Gurevich for spotting the problems with Safari. Prior to the changes the plugin used three different methods to detect the loading of the script element. For Safari and Konqueror a sequential script technique was used. This technique has now been replaced with the polling technique, like in COWS. So the following three solutions are used.
1.) For IE it used its proprietary onreadystatechange event
2.) For Safari and Konqueror it uses the polling technique
3.) For Firefox and Opera it uses the standard onload event
Timing problems
In addition to the cross browser compatibility problems I noticed another complication. In Prototype 1.5.0 the onLoading, onSuccess etc., are generally fired by running the onreadystatechange function. However this is not the case for a transport status below 2. Actually the onLoading event is triggered by a delayed function after the open command. I didn’t realize this initially. However if you have a script which loads rather fast it will result in onSuccess executing before onLoading. This issue was fixed by calling respondToReadyState directly.
Points of Improvement
Firstly the current implementation detects browsers, not capabilities. This might create problems with future or buggy versions of browsers.
Secondly the usage of a global variable to indicate transport status makes it impossible to handle simultaneous requests nicely.
Thirdly the script currently does not clean up the script nodes.
If these points turn out to be troublesome, I will use a modified version of COWS for the transport aspects.
Conclusion
The new version of this plug-in is widely cross browser compatible. Currently it is suitable for a large variety of applications. It is however not yet ready to deal with simultaneous requests.
