Let's say I have a website that has a lot of information on our products. I'd like some of our customers (including us!) to be able to look up our products for various methods, including:

1) Pulling data from AJAX calls that return data in cool, JavaScripty-ways 2) Creating iPhone applications that use that data; 3) Having other web applications use that data for their own end.

Normally, I'd just create an API and be done with it. However, this data is in fact mildly confidential - which is to say that we don't want our competitors to be able to look up all our products every morning and then automatically set their prices to undercut us. And we also want to be able to look at who might be abusing the system, so if someone's making ten million complex calls to our API a day and bogging down our server, we can cut them off.

My next logical step would be then to create a developers' key to restrict access - which would work fine for web apps, but not so much for any AJAX calls. (As I see it, they'd need to provide the key in the JavaScript, which is in plaintext and easily seen, and hence there's actually no security at all. Particularly if we'd be using our own developers' keys on our site to make these AJAX calls.)

So my question: after looking around at Oauth and OpenID for some time, I'm not sure there is a solution that would handle all three of the above. Is there some sort of canonical "best practices" for developers' keys, or can Oauth and OpenID handle AJAX calls easily in some fashion I have yet to grok, or am I missing something entirely?