This post is about CommonJS Package, a library, allowing consumers to list, read, write, delete & comment private / public gists. Library employs v2 & v1 Github API’s in combination with some dirty hacks to make this possible.
Main target platform is a browser, but it can run on any other platform that
will provide implementation of XMLHttpRequests. Since browsers have many
limitations in comparison to other platforms this idea was a challenge form a
beginning. The first thing and probably something you already have in mind is
same origin policy. Luckily all modern browsers today implement W3C
standard for cross-origin resource sharing. Unfortunately though, only a few
websites employ this technique and reply client with
Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers. Believe me or not, Github is not one
of those!! Actually convincing them to start useing this
standard was not as easy either…
I did not want to give up, so I have decide to implement this library anyway with accompany of two proof of concept experiments demoed in previous posts. I really hope this way I’ll get enough attention from Github folks and they will see a value of improved browser friendly Gist API’s :)
As you could’ve guessed I found a workaround, actually not, I’ll better call
it an elegant solution :) Anyway solution to this problem was YQL. If you
don’t know yet, it’s a very cool service from Yahoo and likely easiest way
to make rest services + all in JavaScript, you should definitely check
it out!! After some hacking I’ve managed to put together several
“YQL Open Data Tables” with an access to data that can’t be
retrieved with a current Github API’s. Most importantly allowing users to
select and insert private gists. Since YQL puts
Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers, same origin policy problem was solved,
as a side effect it also allowed some optimizations by moving several
operations from client to server.
Unfortunately it’s not the end of the story neither it was end of the issues
I had to run into. After a while I discovered that firefox sends HTTP OPTONS
request, before sending desired HTTP POST on which YQL replies without
necessary Access-Control-Allow-Origin header. With HTTP GET everything is
fine since HTTP OPTIONS are not send in that case. Other browsers don’t have
issues nor with GET nor with POST since they don’t seem to send
HTTP OPTIONS. I have reported about this issue to YQL folks and they
were super fast with picking it up, they plan to have a fix in for a next
release, which I hope will be anytime soon.
After all the efforts github library is ready to be forked!! So please give it a try and lets make some amazing stuff to show Github folks that, ###we need a better Gist API’s!!###