Publish/Edit pages. Passing/Grabbing data between tabs

Hello!

Back from a wonderful EECI2009 all fired up and enthused I’ve started hacking away on a few EE extensions/modules/plugins or simply “addons” and I’ve run into my first gotcha.

I’ve created an extension, that adds a new tab to the publish/edit pages. All works.. looks lovely.. I’ve even got text and inputs in it! (Woo Go me!)

Looking at the raw html / code of the publish/edit pages is giving me a headache, it seems most of the the heavy lifting is done by javascript (not my strong point, until jQuery it was in my “don’t touch with a barge-pole” alongside frames and Flash… oops!). Once all the data is in, I can see it gets posted in, and magic happens.

What I’d like to do is in my tab, be able to reference something in another tab. Namely the fields (inputs, textareas etc) in the Publish Form. Preferably into a simple $var or $array.

I am assuming that this temporary form data is held in some session/var somewhere.. but I am struggling to find it. Is it lurking somewhere? Or is it all in javascript / DOM ?

Sorry for the epic waffleness of this question, and thanks in advance to any light people can shed on it!

Ta muchly

Geoff @orionesque