The Astronomy page demonstrates a cross-domain integration. I wanted to have a nice pan/zoom function and automatically build a gallery for some old astronomy images I had. A cross-domain AJAX call was used to:

• Scan the desired images directory
  
• Create thumbnails using the image center and re-sizing / cropping it while maintaining aspect ratio. The thumbnails are cached.
• Any new images added will automatically get thumbnails created and appear in the gallery
• Build the HTML complete with Zoom abilities
  
• Return that to the caller (across any number of web pages or domains)
  

The web template just needs a few lines of Javascript to perform the call and integrate the results. In this case JSONP was used since the web server and image/REST server are in different physical locations and domains.

This was just a simple example and more effort would be needed in a large scale deployment but it works as a nice example of using multiple servers/services to do what would be hard for each to do alone.

The basic Internet services such as Web site design, comments, e-commerce and data storage have become more advanced and available at ever lower prices. Many services are stunningly good and are at least good enough for a large number of individuals and businesses.

Canfield Research Group has been working with integrating systems using AJAX, REST and other services for some time and I was eager to see if one of the advanced on-line web-design site tools would be good enough to manage our general needs. After all, we can always insert whatever functionality we care to into any page.

We do not tend to do web pages. We focus on back-end systems , injecting functionality into any web site and in core infrastructure and data center deployments. It was time to see what capabilities someone else had available. Someone whose focus is on web sites, design and associated services.

So here we are in 2014, doing what we always have. Combining the most appropriate tools, infrastructure and custom services into a seamless whole. We started with static pages, moved to Drupal and now it's time to try  taking the next obvious step ourselves and moving our web pages to a separate service.