I understand that grabbing a user's information from the JavaScript API and then exporting it to an external server is a no-no, and I would like to avoid it. I would like to interact with a given user's information, specifically, their friends, external to the interface on the canvas.
In order to avoid problems with exporting data, I would like to be able to make a call (like in makeRequest) from the server side to pull a user's information after receiving a request from a user on the canvas. The only information that would be pushed from the canvas to the server side would be the user's ID, such as "myspace:283324". The backend would handle it from there.
I have looked and looked, but I have found absolutely nothing helpful on this topic. I am not planning on caching the data or anything. Our backend server application is written in JavaServer Pages (running on Tomcat 6), and we have code that runs on the Java OpenSocial client libraries.
Thanks in advance for your help. :D