It's just a proxy, you could do the same with a single line of PHP, e.g.: <?php readfile('http://api.example.org/?key=APIKEY&action=' . $_GET['action']); ?>

Of course, or a line or two of just about any server language.

But someone using using Backlift as their server wouldn't have that option; this API is for them.

http://backlift.github.io/docs/

True, but then you're writing server code. Our platform is intended to help front-end developers / designers avoid writing server code.

You can use YQL for this and many, many other operations that you would normally not be able to easily do on the client. It is free, deployed in 5+ datacenters worldwide, will cache both directions, and widely used by Yahoo so very unlikely to be turned off. It even offers persistent storage.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/

This article would be easier to read if it started off with a quick overview of Tunnel (creates a path in your app that proxies to another site), rather than the how-to. A couple of sentences in the first paragraph would do it.

It's sort of like http://getr.ws/ but bound to a specific application platform.