Breaking the " same origin security policy" with CORS. An example with @GenomeBrowser / DAS.

Jerven Bolleman recently taught me about the CORS/Cross-origin resource sharing:

@yokofakun we support the CORS header. I have not looked at what jsonp needs will investigate

— Jerven Bolleman (@jervenbolleman) May 20, 2014

"Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a mechanism that allows many resources (e.g. fonts, JavaScript, etc.) on a web page to be requested from another domain outside of the domain the resource originated from. In particular, JavaScript's AJAX calls can use the XMLHttpRequest mechanism. Such "cross-domain" requests would otherwise be forbidden by web browsers, per the same origin security policy."

I've created a page testing if some bioinformatics web-service support CORS. This page is available at : http://lindenb.github.io/pages/cors/index.html

Interestingly NCBI, Uniprot and UCSC support CORS. As an example, the following <form> fetches a DNA sequence using the DAS server of the UCSC and display it:

Position

The script:

That's it
Pierre