Thursday, July 23. 2009
Adobe AIR and its Security Model
I hate it. Until you start working with it and messing around with it, the documentation is terribly confusing. I kept trying to find an example (for quite some time) of how to use AJAX from within the main application sandbox (the initial "window" that opens upon run) to an external server. Almost all examples kept referencing local files from within the application, or used Flex which has a different mechanism in going out and grabbing information.
Jonathan Snook recently mentioned a talk he had given about plain old HTML/JS development of AIR applications in his blog, and...knowing it was my golden opportunity, I had to ask him if he knew of any examples of how to use AJAX in the main application window on an external domain with regard to the obscurities of the sandbox security.
He simply told me (paraphrased), "There is no security restriction on the main application sandbox. It should just work." Oooooooh, boy. Don't I feel stupid when I went and tried it and it worked just fine. I tried to PayPal him $10 for his time in responding, but apparently PayPal won't let me send money from my own account unless I link my credit card or bank account.
Some of you may remember my Reference Statistics Tracker Application that I have discussed in the past; that is the Adobe AIR application that I needed this assistance with... I had that part of the project (Reference Statistic Tracker) on hold simply because I couldn't figure out how to make a remote call, which sort of hinged on a majority of the GUI since the GUI is dynamically built. Awesome. At least I can continue now - especially now that the Staff Site's authentication is done. Luckily, I found a better tooltip plugin to use for the GUI in the meantime.
I'll probably create either a GitHub account, or create a public SVN repository on a subdomain here that can hold different projects I'm working on, if anyone's interested once this gets closer to a usable state. Any immediate preferences?
Jonathan Snook recently mentioned a talk he had given about plain old HTML/JS development of AIR applications in his blog, and...knowing it was my golden opportunity, I had to ask him if he knew of any examples of how to use AJAX in the main application window on an external domain with regard to the obscurities of the sandbox security.
He simply told me (paraphrased), "There is no security restriction on the main application sandbox. It should just work." Oooooooh, boy. Don't I feel stupid when I went and tried it and it worked just fine. I tried to PayPal him $10 for his time in responding, but apparently PayPal won't let me send money from my own account unless I link my credit card or bank account.
Some of you may remember my Reference Statistics Tracker Application that I have discussed in the past; that is the Adobe AIR application that I needed this assistance with... I had that part of the project (Reference Statistic Tracker) on hold simply because I couldn't figure out how to make a remote call, which sort of hinged on a majority of the GUI since the GUI is dynamically built. Awesome. At least I can continue now - especially now that the Staff Site's authentication is done. Luckily, I found a better tooltip plugin to use for the GUI in the meantime.
I'll probably create either a GitHub account, or create a public SVN repository on a subdomain here that can hold different projects I'm working on, if anyone's interested once this gets closer to a usable state. Any immediate preferences?