First, I needed a way to access and display games that a user is currently playing. This can be done with the API: http://weewar.com/api1/user/[username] and is already partially done with the Weewar Profiler Greasemonkey script, which I was already somewhat familiar with, having had to edit it every time there was a Weewar UI change that broke it. I adapted that to take in a username from an HTML form and use the Javascript XMLHttpRequst object, but then it didn’t work. It turns out that, unlike Greasemonkey, using normal Javascript, you can’t make calls to pages outside of your domain, for security reasons. That makes sense, but was a bummer.

So I had to make the API calls from my webhosting server and decided to learn how to do it using PHP, which I barely knew. (What other easy ways are there?) I used this as a reference, and just now realized upon exploring the Yahoo Developer Center that my approach was already documented here: Fixing AJAX: XMLHttpRequest Considered Harmful. Ha! I guess that doesn’t leave much to say except that I pretty much did method #1 there.

Also, since I had to make many XMLHttpRequest requests, I had to make an array of those objects to keep them from confusing one another. It took me a while to figure out why that was happening, why I was only getting one or a couple requests returned correctly. So I guess that’s it. Now I know how to make REST calls using sockets in Java, Apache HttpClient in Java, the Spring 3 REST template in Java, XMLHttpRequest objects in Javascript, GM_xmlhttpRequest in Greasemonkey Javascript, and the cURL extension in PHP. Whoo!

Aside: I just realized that the Poster Firefox add-on, which I had downloaded a couple weeks back, makes REST calls as well, and in a much more general-purpose way. Oh well. I wouldn’t have learned much had I not done all that I had done yesterday, so it was not all for nothing. =) Here is what resulted from it, by the way: Weewar Bot Control

Hm. Am I an aspiring web programmer? It certainly is fun and the Internet is the Wave of the Future/Present. I’ll have to think on that some more. I’m still quite attached to neuroscience research. At the very least, web programming is a nice, useful hobby. =)

Also, in searching for code to deal with chunked responses, I came across Apache HttpComponents. I knew something like this existed by Apache but I didn’t realize that it took care of so much for you. Now I’m wondering why the Citrus Framework doesn’t use this to handle HTTP requests. Right now, it uses mostly Spring to handle a fair amount of the configuration and message building, but it doesn’t yet handle chunked responses, at least not that I’m aware of. Now, to code it manually or use massive amounts of code already written? That’s obvious. I should talk with the Citrus developer, get onboard, and see if he has a preference first though, since these changes to the Citrus source would be useful to others too.