In some of his work with Backbone.js recently, Gonzalo Ayuso has been frustrated by something that's a wall for many developers wanting to work with outside datasources - the browser restriction that prevents cross-domain requests. His solution? Create a REST proxy to live on his server and pass the requests through.

Nowadays there is a header to allow it: Access-Control-Allow-Origin. The problem is that the remote server must set up this header. For example I was playing with github’s API and github doesn’t have this header. If the server is my server, is pretty straightforward to put this header but obviously I’m not the sysadmin of github, so I cannot do it. What the solution? One possible solution is, for example, create a proxy server at localhost with PHP.

He shares the full code for his project - basically a handler that takes the incoming request and mirrors to out to the public, remote API - request method and all. It uses some of the packages from Symfony (like the http-foundation) and wraps around cURL to handle the requests. The project is available for Composer users as well.