Wednesday, June 1, 2016

AJAX rant

OK, so it's been 2.5 months since I made any forward progress on the FreeCodeCamp site.

Partly that's been because of my difficult background/domestic situation, which took a swerve in March. There is hope for a new era in July.

But also it's because of an incomprehensible (to me, based on FCCamp training to date) error: "XMLHttpRequest cannot load ... No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource."

I've spent the last couple of months googling and reading in my scraps of space time. And feeling really (irrationally) angry about being thrown suddenly into the deep end. Being expected to suddenly be able to read the Wikipedia API developer docs as if I had the background to understand. Let alone understand an error like that.  AJAX, JSONP, CORS... The only beginner's intro I found anywhere was buried in a single chapter in an O'Reilly Head First book (was it jQuery? HTML5? I can't remember. But it wasn't AJAX), and that was only an intro.

I finally found FFCampers discussing the problem here and here via Google, but the conversation was above my head. Annoyingly the discussion voices range from the successful-but-confused to the smugly-superior. No one seems to place any value on actually understanding, or helping someone else actually understand.

2.5 months later, I think I may have finally gained enough background info be able to read and understand the learn.jQuery.com AJAX tutorial and give the "Wikipedia Reader" project another try. But I remain very cranky.

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Found another grumpy FCCamper: "I have asked on Glitter, checked dozens of solutions including JSONP plugins, tried code that worked from other Freecodecampers on line, tried numerous Javascript, Ajax, JQuery, JSONP approaches, etc. I have spent more effort on overcoming CORS than on the rest of this curriculum combined." FCCamp replied with a cheery 'here, just use this code, it works,' but no explanation of the concepts involved.