title: $.ajax and $.getJSON for json and jsonp fail to properly get response from 3rd party server
body: <p>As the title says I'm attempting to retrieve a json from an api given by the site. I've tried a variety of things now and have gotten varied results. I want to be able to retrieve and parse the json to get the information that I want out of it. Here's what I've tried:</p>
  
  <p>1) $.ajax()
  Code chunk (runs when a button is clicked):</p>
  
  <pre><code>  $.ajax({
              type: 'GET',
              url: url,
              dataType: 'json',
              success: function(data) {
                  alert('Success!');
              }
          });
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This produces a "Origin null is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin." error and does not get a response from the server (for Chrome or FF, I don't care about IE since this is a small project for my use). <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6396623/jquery-getjson-access-control-allow-origin-issue">Looking around</a> I thought the problem might be that I need it to be a jsonp dataType since I am trying to connect to an outside website. This lead me to try #2</p>
  
  <p>2) $.ajax with jsonp dataType</p>
  
  <pre><code>$.ajax({
          type: 'GET',
          url: url,
          dataType: 'jsonp',
          success: function(data) {
              alert('Success!');
          }
      });
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I also appended "&amp;callback=?" to the end of "url" that I give to the function. Using Chrom's Dev Tool I can see a response from the server this time but the alert never displays. I used JSONLINT to confirm that the response was a proper json (it is) and I've tried setting the json to a variable so I can play with it (along the lines of initializing a variable earlier in the script tag [var response;] and trying to assign the json to it[response = data;]). This produced undefined when I tried to alert(response); later on (I don't believe the response=json; bit ever got called for some reason).</p>
  
  <p>I've also tried using $.getJSON but looking at the api for it it apparently just runs $.ajax anyway (I luckily got the same responses/errors when trying json vs jsonp for $.getJSON as I did when trying $.ajax). When I try as a jsonp Chrome (FF doesn't produce this error) shows a "Unexpected Syntax Error: Unexpected token :". <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3143698/uncaught-syntaxerror-unexpected-token">This</a> makes me think that the site I'm trying to talk to doesn't have jsonp working and I can't access the third party site as just a json request. The link talks about how setting the server to return as application/json rather than text/html, like I get from my response, fixed the problem for them (but again, I'm trying to access a third party site and thus I can't access the server).</p>
  
  <p>I've tried this in Chrome and FF and looked at Dev Tools/Firebug for each and seen the same thing (though FF doesn't produce the origin error, but that's apparently a bug with Chrome anyway).</p>
  
  <p>Also: I've taken the json response returned and run $.parseJSON on it and been able to grab various pieces but how can I access the json once I get $.ajax/$.getJSON working?</p>
  
  <p>Any thoughts/solutions would be greatly appreciated.</p>