On an iphone, you can add a favourite when on a webpage and if that webpage has the correct meta tags for iphone, it gets an icon and can even ‘hide’ the browsers chrome and display just like an App. With html5 http headers you can even have the phone completely cache the ‘app’ so that it never has to contact the server again.
The problem I have is that I want to write apps that make xmlhttprequests to a server that is not the server they were originally from. I heard its possible to do this if you somehow export your favourites and HTML5 chache then manually edit the export file to change the URL for the favourite, then import them again, so that the phone doesn’t think the javascript is trying a cross site xmlhttprequest.
However I have not found anything like that (maybe it was a jailbreak thing?). At the moment I have to have a proxy on the server where the ‘app’ originally came from, which is obviously very annoying.
I also heard that there was a special meta tag that allowed you to specify one other domain for xmlhttprequest, it had something to do with specifying that the page was actually a mirror and should be treated as if it came from another domain. Does anyone know what meta tag this is? I tried searching all over apple and found nothing.
I believe it might also be possible if you can get webkit to treat the cache as a file:// protocal, because then cross site security will not apply.
The answer is this is not possible and is not meant to be possible.