I'm trying to build a Google gadget using XML/Javascript by following the lessons here. However, I can't seem to figure out a way to send GET and POST requests using Javascript. Is this even possible? Any one else have experience working with Google's APIs?

EDIT: Sorry for the incorrect spelling in the title

I don't know about Google's API's but normally you would need to use XMLHTTPRequest.

Both jQuery and Prototype javascript libraries make it easier.

What Brian said.

Thanks, I'll look into those. Any links to good tutorials would also be helpful.

With jQuery:

$.get(path,params,function(data){
// data is whatever the response content is
});

post is identical but with $.post

http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax

Honestly, it's a piece of cake, no tutorials required.

Like Detty said, it's called AJAX.

I should probably learn jQuery, I've just been using XMLHTTPRequest.

I kept getting a 403 error while running my AJAX scripts. After scrounging around I found out that you can only make requests to server scripts in the same domain.

How the hell can I test my scripts on a local computer?

Two things to consider:

1) Browsers often (but not always) won't let you execute AJAX requests from the file:// protocol, your local machine needs to be running a web server.

2) See if the server you are making your requests against supports JSONP, it's a simple wrapper around the JSON format that allows you to access data from other domains. JQuery's getJSON method supports this natively.

setup a virtual machine with a simple web server

Yeah you need a web server, obviously. Most popular one is Apache. Lighttpd is another popular one. I use XAMPP which bundles Apache, PHP, and MySQL together in one package.