At the recent Web Directions 06 conference Cameron Adams and Sitepoint’s own Kevin Yank gave a talk on Mashups and APIs, with a mention of JSON-P.

JSON-P is a method of wrapping the JSON output of your API calls to allow other developers to call your API from within their page, bypassing the browser security mechanism.

If you peek at the HTML source of Web Connections you’ll notice we’re using JSON-P internally to provide the JS data to do the mapping. In the URL of the JSON-P call we can specify the parameter variable, callback or both, and this will allow others to use our JSON in their own mashups.