Backstage Blog

• API

From today on, we advise developers to use OAuth 2 as preferred way of API authentication. Our implementation of the Draft 10 OAuth 2 specification is in production for several months months now and we made good experiences with it. Thus we move it from beta to official recommendation.

OAuth 2 makes it easier for developers to implement authentication for accessing private resources. The feedback we got from external app developers and our in-house API users has been very positive. This is what Ullrich, one of the developers of the SoundCloud iPhone app and Cocoa wrapper, has to say about…

• API
• JavaScript

If you’re a JavaScript head, we’ve got something for you. SoundCloud now supports Cross Origin Resource Sharing, using XMLHttpRequest. Or, to put it another way: no more implausible JSON-P hacks.

Some background on CORS can be found here and here.  Our implementation is super-simple:  we let you do GET requests, for our public resources. Full documentation of the feature is on our wiki, but here’s a bit of code to get you started:

var invocation = new XMLHttpRequest();
// Internet Explorer uses a propritary object called XDomainRequest
var url = 'https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks';
function callOtherDomain() {
    if (invocation) {
        invocation.open('GET', url, true);
        invocation.onreadystatechange = handler;
        invocation.send();
    }
}

As we’re just setting headers, the implementation was done as an…