Now with added Ajax

We’ve finally got our first bit of Ajax on the OPAC, although it’s not currently working with Firefox.
Thanks to the wonderful Scriptaculous, the “people who borrowed this” suggestions in our OPAC are now powered by Ajax – e.g.:
The printing revolution in early modern Europe

…clicking on the “show more” link brings in the next batch of selections without having to reload the entire page.
The reason why Firefox won’t show anything is that our JBoss/Jetty OPAC runs on webcat.hud.ac.uk port 80, but the Apache mod_perl server that generates the suggestions runs off port 4128 on the same server.  Unfortunately that’s enough of a difference for the Firefox security to block the script from running, although Firefox still seems to happy to bring in other (non Ajax) JavaScript content from the Apache server.  Many thanks to the guru’s on #code4lib for spotting the problem!
To get around this problem, I’m planning to move the OPAC to a different port and set Apache to run on port 80 and then configure it to act as a reverse proxy for the OPAC.  Once I’ve done that, from the web browser’s point-of-view, everything will appearing to be coming from port 80 (which solves the Firefox Ajax issue).
This also helps out with the problem that SirsiDynix don’t seem to provide any security patches for the JBoss/Jetty server that runs their OPAC — by moving the OPAC and placing it behind the Apache server, it means that the OPAC cannot be accessed directly (which provides a degree of “security through depth”).