I'm currently researching the best way to approach building a javascript widget someone can embed on their site, which would retrieve and display information from an external MySQL database. The gist of the widget would mimic the needs/functionality of Twitter's widget (http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets), where it uses some combination of JS, PHP and/or AJAX and retrieves information from a MySQL DB with secure (or at least somewhat safe) cross-browser access. Thoughts or ideas on the best and most reliable way to approach something like this?