How do I access Wolfram's API data? - javascript

Could someone explain how I can access Wolfram's API data? I'm not worried about formatting for now--I would just like to learn the basics of interacting with the API.
The Wolfram website FAQ says this: "The Wolfram|Alpha API is designed to operate with interactive web technologies such as AJAX, Flash, and Silverlight."
And the documentation, which is located here: http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/documentation.html, says this: "A simple API call to retrieve output for the query "pi" would look like this:
http://api.wolframalpha.com/v2/query?input=pi&appid=XXXX
This query did not specify a desired output format, and the default is to retrieve the plaintext and image representations of each subpod. The image is returned as an <img> tag suitable for direct inclusion in a web page. Here is the output:"
I just have no idea how to put this together to actually access the Wolfram API data. Do I use AJAX or something else? What is the basic code for accessing the data?
I'm very new at this, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot!!

To use XMLHttpRequest their server must enable credentials by setting the Access-Control-Allow-Credentials response header to “true”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing
By AJAX I think they mean your server code should make the request.
In the next example they use Java Server Pages on their own domain to make the request:
https://reference.wolfram.com/webMathematica/tutorial/ApplicationsAJAX.html
Check other answers:
Wolfram API javascript cross origin sharing issue

If you use JQuery, a common javasSript framework, you can make an ajax request as follows
var requestData = function() {
$.ajax({
url: "http://api.wolframalpha.com/v2/query?input=pi&appid=XXXX",
}).done(function(data) {
//data should contain the response from wolframalpha
});

Related

National Weather Service javascript jquery ajax 0 error

For some reason the National Weather Service's xml site does not work for me. When I say "does not work", I mean that I've tried both XMLHttpRequest and ajax to GET the xml data from http://w1.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KSFO.xml in order to write a script that displays current weather conditions. this is my code:
(function (){
updateWeather();
})();
function updateWeather(){
var url= "http://w1.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KSFO.xml";
$.ajax({
url: url,
dataType: 'xml',
error:function(xhr){
document.getElementById("weatherbox").innerHTML="error" +xhr.status+xhr.statusText;},
success:function(result,status,xhr){
document.getElementById('weatherbox').innerHTML="success";
}
});
}
I know that you typically cannot request information cross domain, but the NWS site says its open to the public and im using an ajax call and since it seems as though nobody else has this problem it must not be a cross domain error, but i have tried using crossDomain: true in the ajax call. I have tried making the url "https:...." instead but that did nothing. I've tried specifying type:'GET' in the ajax call as well. Every time I run the script it returns error0error . Does anyone have any ideas? A working implementation of an ajax call would be even better, I've been working at this for days and it's driving me crazy that I can't seem to retrieve this data.
in response to the first comment, I looked into it before but it seems like the SOAP service is for requesting data packages, such as "the weather in SF from january to september" or something, and from the looks of this:
"XML Feeds of Current Weather Conditions
This page provides access to observed current weather conditions for about 1,800 locations across the United States and US Territories. Two file formats designed for computer to computer data transfer are provided. RSS and XML lists are provided to aid the automated dissemination of this information. More information on RSS and XML formats/feeds. Comments and feedback are welcome. There is additional information about this offering via this Product Description Document.
Select a State or Territory to locate XML weather observations feeds available:
Select a State/Territory above to list display list of observations stations An index list of all available stations is available in XML (900kb): XML Format"
and
"About XML
NWS offers hourly weather observations formatted with xml tags to aid in the parsing of the information by automated programs used to populate databases, display information on webpages or other similar applications. This format is not to be confused with RSS and cannot be read by RSS readers and aggregators. These files present more detailed information than the RSS feeds in strings friendly for parsing. Both the RSS and XML feeds offer URLs to icon images. Additionally, A list of what phrases may appear in the XML tag and suggested icons is available. To access these feeds, select a state and then the last XML link in the column."
from this site: http://w1.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/
i should be able to just use the xml from the link i posted above to retrieve current observation data and not packages like one would use for calculating or predicting forecast trends, AND it seems as though the SOAP request service actually would not work for my purposes because i cannot just order one data point.
You could use JSONP request to avoid getting CORS errors, but this SOAP service does not wrap data in script. Just try reading the docs here. You'll most probably have to create a client. NWS also provides a RESTful API. Read the tutorials here.
If you can use a php proxy, then look at http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/cross-domain-javascript-with-simple-php-proxy/ for the solution, and the corresponding code link at pastebin
To summarize, the solution uses an intermediary to the remote site that sits at the same location as your JS code. You invoke the proxy by setting the url parameter to your target. Let's say you saved the proxy code to filename 'weatherproxy.php' and your webserver supports the php module and curl support, then you would set your variable as
var url = 'weatherproxy.php?url=http://w1.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KSFO.xml';
With no other options to your proxy, on success it will return a json with the form:
{ status: { http_code: 200 }, contents: "your xml contents as a string" }
From there you would have to invoke an xml interpreter on 'contents'. Alternatively, there are parameters that you can supply to that proxy to return the raw xml. The parameter is '&mode=native'. I'm not sure though that jQuery can properly handle the XML that returns.
Have fun exploring the code.

Reading contents of an iframe with wikipedia source? [duplicate]

I am trying to implement a simple request to Wikipedia's API using AJAX (XMLHttpRequest). If I type the url in the address bar of Firefox, I get a neat XML, no sweat there. Yet, calling the exact same url with:
// this is my XMLHttpRequest object
httpObjectMain.open("GET", "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=xml&prop=langlinks&lllimit=500&titles=kaas", true);
httpObjectMain.send(null);
returns an empty response. According to FireBug, I get a 200 OK response, but the content is just empty.
I suspect I might be missing something on the header of the GET http request.
Help! (and thanks!)
The Wikipedia API does support JSONP.
Your query string'll become something like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&callback=test&prop=langlinks&lllimit=500&titles=kaas
But you'll have to build the jsonp handler (or you can use your favorite library to do it), switch to json output format from the xml you choose and create the callback function to parse the result and do the stuff you need on the page.
The browser will not allow you to send an XHR to another domain other than the one the page is on. This is for security purposes.
One way around this that I have seen is to setup a proxy on the domain the page is hosted on that will pass requests through to the actual api server. See http://ajaxpatterns.org/Cross-Domain_Proxy

Does d3.json() support authentication? If not, what other JavaScript options are available for JSON retrieval?

I am developing an application that needs to gather information from GitHub, so I began looking at their API. My initial thought was to use the d3.json() function to get the data (because it's simple and has done good things for me in the past), but there doesn't appear to be a way for me to authenticate with that function. For example, $ curl -u "username" https://api.github.com is given as an example of basic authentication (from GitHub API--obviously they use curl for their examples).
So, is there a way to do authentication with the d3.json() function? And if not, what are my other options to get the JSON with JavaScript?
Thanks!
Edit:
I'm experimenting now with using jQuery's getJSON method as shown here, because I started getting the error "XMLHttpRequest cannot load url Origin url is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin." Of course, the switch doesn't help with the ability to authenticate, but I can at least get the public data (which is most).
Edit #2:
Has anyone experimented with michael/github or fitzgen/github-api? I'm going to start looking into those.
If you have a PHP script which echos JSON, you can do all authentication server-side. Note that you can also send a GET request to your PHP script, so the way you call your script can be dynamic.

Need Help With Getting Cross Domain XML With JavaScript

Alright, so I'm building a web app that provides music information (i.e. info on artists, albums, songs, etc.) and for the info source I'm using the MusicBrainz API.
Now, I'm trying to load the data from an API call and process it, with jQuery. This is the code I'm using:
Code:
queryString="http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/artist/?type=xml&name="+qry+"&limit=10";
$.ajax({url: queryString, dataType: ($.browser.msie) ? "text" : "xml", success: function(data){
alert("success");
var xml;
if (typeof data == "string") {
xml = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xml.async = false;
xml.loadXML(data);
} else {
xml = data;
};
...
With 'queryString' being the URL string for the request, and then I'd proceed to read the data out of the 'xml' object. Fairly simple.
However, this is where problems arise. The code works flawlessly when running locally on my computer, but does not work at all when I upload everything to my web server and try to run it there. I did some reading and have discovered that AJAX calls can't be made across different domains, due to security issues.
So I've read through numerous solutions, but almost all require either something with PHP (which I have absolutely NO knowledge of) or grabbing the data in JSON format (which apparently isn't subject to the same security restrictions). However, my main problem is that the MusicBrainz API does not return data in JSON format (in fact the only format it returns is XML).
So in any event, I was basically just wondering if anyone could give me some help or pointers on if and how I could grab that remote XML file using only JS/jQuery. Or, point me toward another method that could be accomplished by a complete PHP noob like myself.
Thanks for any help!
You require something on your server side to proxy your request to that other server. A URL that looks like:
/proxy?url=http%3A//musicbrainz.org/ws/1/artist/%3Ftype%3Dxml%26name%3Dexample%26limit%3D10
If PHP is available on your server, you can Google to find a generic PHP proxy script.
EDIT Here is an example of very simple PHP script that will retrieve a specified URL:
<?php readfile($_GET['url']) ?>
Note that you won't be able to POST any data to it, or specify a Content-Type. This is the most basic proxy required for very basic needs.
I understand that JSON is not an option right now but still, here is the explanation of why it can work for cross domain requests.
JSON being Javascript, it can be queried using the <script> tag instead of XMLHttpRequest. Since the <script> tag does not have the same restriction for cross domain request, it is possible to retrieve the JSON content this way.
This technique is called JSONP and is implemented in jQuery in the getJSON function.
If you don't want to setup your own proxy server, check out my response here: use jsonp to get xml cross domain

Importing a JSON feed from an external source in Javascript

I'd like to load a JSON feed from an external source using Javascript; what's the best method? I've been working a lot in PHP where it would be easy to do so with file_get_contents or cURL. Is there a related function or process in Javascript?
jQuery to get some JSON data might look like this:
$.getJSON("http://pathtodata.js", function(json){
alert(json.dot.notation);
});
A source is specified along with a callback function. Read up on jQuery JSON documentation:
http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.getJSON/
Javascript XMLHTTPRequest has same-domain origin policy so you will be restricted to only loading data from URLs from the same domain that your script was loaded from. JSONP is one way to get around this. Another way is to use a proxy script on your domain, which in turns performs its own HTTP calls for you. For more information on JSONP check out this article:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-aj-jsonp1/

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