Today I Searched

Today I Searched how to make an AJAX call to a URL on a different domain. My first attempt failed with a security error. I dug into the problem a bit and found out that PHP can be used as a proxy to fetch the web content.

AJAX Calls PHP Script On Your Domain -> PHP Script Fetches Content From Remote Domain -> PHP Script Returns The Remote Data Back To The AJAX Call

Below is a sample PHP script that I found and tweaked.

// Set your return content type
header('Content-type: text/html');

// Website url to open
$daurl = 'http://www.otherdomain.com/index.php?sku=' . $_GET["sku"];

// Get that website's content
$handle = fopen($daurl, "r");

// If there is something, read and return
if ($handle) {
    while (!feof($handle)) {
        $buffer = fgets($handle, 4096);
        echo $buffer;
    }
    fclose($handle);
}

Below is the AJAX call to load the content into a div using JQuery

$("#loadremotecontent").load('getprice.php?sku=322000');

The script could be further modified to pass in the entire URL as a parameter so it could be more generic. I would love to hear about other cross domain AJAX options if anyone has any other suggestions.