Get JSON data from external URL and display it in a div as plain text

Solution 1:

Here is one without using JQuery with pure JavaScript. I used javascript promises and XMLHttpRequest You can try it here on this fiddle

HTML

<div id="result" style="color:red"></div>

JavaScript

var getJSON = function(url) {
  return new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
    var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xhr.open('get', url, true);
    xhr.responseType = 'json';
    xhr.onload = function() {
      var status = xhr.status;
      if (status == 200) {
        resolve(xhr.response);
      } else {
        reject(status);
      }
    };
    xhr.send();
  });
};

getJSON('https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/text/en/bob_dylan').then(function(data) {
    alert('Your Json result is:  ' + data.result); //you can comment this, i used it to debug

    result.innerText = data.result; //display the result in an HTML element
}, function(status) { //error detection....
  alert('Something went wrong.');
});

Solution 2:

You can do this with JSONP like this:

function insertReply(content) {
    document.getElementById('output').innerHTML = content;
}

// create script element
var script = document.createElement('script');
// assing src with callback name
script.src = 'http://url.to.json?callback=insertReply';
// insert script to document and load content
document.body.appendChild(script);

But source must be aware that you want it to call function passed as callback parameter to it.

With google API it would look like this:

function insertReply(content) {
    document.getElementById('output').innerHTML = content;
}

// create script element
var script = document.createElement('script');
// assing src with callback name
script.src = 'https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/text/en/bob_dylan?callback=insertReply';
// insert script to document and load content
document.body.appendChild(script);

Check how data looks like when you pass callback to google api: https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/text/en/bob_dylan?callback=insertReply

Here is quite good explanation of JSONP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP