Proxy Information

The i2b2 Web Client communicates with server-side web services using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX).

All modern web browsers follow a universal security standard which does not allow JavaScript code to directly communicate with any server that is not the exact same base URL that was used to load the web page. This behavior is critically important in preventing a hacker's code from offloading your personal information to a random IP overseas; it also prevents web-based applications from directly engaging an enterprise's SOA web services.

The solution to this problem is to use a web proxy that forwards the request to the correct service and then returns the response back to the browser. This extremely simple cell enables the browser based web client to participate fully with the i2b2 Hive.

Although the Web Client is platform independent, a server side proxy has to be written for the type of server that is hosting it. Included in the i2b2 Web Client software is a proxy written in PHP.