Scott Yang's Playground

del.icio.us direc.tor: Johnvey Hwang’s high performance AJAX web service broker. This script is very neat. Setup a bookmarlet. Visit del.icio.us. Click on the bookmarklet, and it instantly transforms your ugly del.icio.us web interface into a fancy AJAX-driven DHTML interface.

What stands out is this implementation does not require a middle man as service broker. It breaks the security restriction of XmlHttpRequest by making you visit the site first, click on a link to insert a <javascript/> element to import direc.tor’s bootstrap script, and completely rewrite the document body (and disable all the stylesheets). Now you have complete control of the document, plus you can make XmlHttpRequest to the site you want, as document location is still the old URL!

For more detailed write up, check this article on setting up a client-side web service broker.

Basically it allows you to do what Greasemonkey does, without Greasemonkey or even Mozilla/Firefox. We shall see more and more of this kind of web applications, the ones that re-write your web sites and make into their own.