There’s been a thread at the amazon simpledb forums discussing that AWS should implment a crossdomain.xml file. I agree that AWS should open up their public facing services to flex developers by implementing a crossdomain.xml file however, simply implementing a crossdomain.xml file will not address the real problems of authentication and security.

The real problem facing flex developers is that it’s not secure to place your amazon secret key inside of a compiled swf. It can easily be decompiled. It’s been suggested that the best solution is to proxy calls through a server, such as an EC2 instance. For just wanting to store and recieve data in S3 or SimpleDB that is just way too much overhead.

The solution is for Amazon to implement a flash proxy service for flex developers. ( and silverlight )

• Flex devs need to register the domains that are associated with thier access key. ( www.mydomain.com )
• Flex devs then only need to send thier access key along with each request.
• The amazon flash proxy service then verifies the domain the request is coming from is in the list of verified domains for that accessky and adds the secret access key to the request before sending the request on it’s way.
• Any requests that come from domains that use an access key outside the list of domains gets denied.

You can read more about it here.

I’m gonna miss the guys from Woodward and at the same time I’m really excited and look forward to working with everyone from UM.

The Problem : You created an AIR application that you want to distribute and you want to load modules remotely over the network or the network. It offers advantages over using the air Updater classes, mainly you can update the module without asking the user to update the installation.

The Issues : Loading a remote module is a security issue.  I first tried to use an <mx:ModuleLoader> tag in my air application and pointed it to my local web server. It did not work. I thought it was a crossdomain.xml issue. and eventually stumbled upon this example

Which is forcing a download of the crossdomain.xml. It did not work. My next attempt was to download the module and attempt to load it as bytes. I tried multiple variations of this, even tried saving the file to the  File.applicationStorageDirectory.  It did not work.

I came across these two articles as well:

Remote Plugins and Modules in AIR by Ethan Malasky

Loading Modules / Runtime CSS into an Air App by Dan Shultz

 

A Solution : What I finally settled on was using the HTML class in air to load a remote application and then talking back and forth using LocalConnection.

Air App

Module App  ( you can’t have this swf running on your machine if you want the Air app to work)

While it’s not a perfect solution, it did allow me to accomplish what I wanted to do. Load remote modules in air and talk back and forth As I said in the beginning of this post. I do not think this will be a permanent solution.

Final thoughts on LocalConnection class.

 –  you only need one local connection / swf. The swf connects to the name of the connection it wants to collect messages from. Other swfs just need to know the name of the connection to send to.

— you set the client = to the context you want the code to be run.

— the underscore “_” on a preceding connection name is a convention in the docs that allows you to circumvent having to know the domain. Otherwise it’s something like mydomain:connectionName.

— allowDomain(“*”) and allowInsecureDomain(“*”) allows you to define what domains can send messages to the receiving local connection.

At any rate, for some background, I spent some time in 2001–2002 in Europe going to school in Paris and made alot of good friends. They are almost all IT developers/designers/managers and I found it quite odd that the big thing they talked about was whether or not “you were on facebook”. I mentioned twitter a few times and pretty much no one knew what i was talking about except a few people.  Things like friendfeed and brightkite where also unheard of and there was no equivalent those sort of emerging new networking sites that catered to French speaking people. Also, flex was well known but not widely adopted. Most of my French friends said that they were looking into using those technologies. Not sure if there is one, but Adobe needs a French speaking flex evangelist. (hint, hint).

A few other things of note is that the food there is still excellent if you know how to order. There seems to be twice as many “Metro Weirdos” than when I lived there and somehow I got some motivation to start a Cave.

Cheers,

Brian..

I was able to catch a degrafa connect session last month in Denver and have been tinkering part time with the framework since then and I had a need to put together a bread crumb (like-ish) navigator so I decided try and use degrafa skinning to get a better look and feel, and it was surprisingly easy! Go Team.

At any rate, this was my first attempt at a BreadCrumbNavigator. I used ComboBox’s, because the lists are gonna have to be filter-able, but for now that code isn’t complete, yet. And also parts of the style is defined in the skins, so I’ll pull them out.

Here’s an example.  Here’s the code.

Learn about Degrafa here.

Yep, that’s me. Or my profile over at palabea.net. I lived in Europe for a spell and have always loved learning new languages so when i heard about palabea I decided to check it out and maybe sharpen my french up or expand my spanish vocab. I didn’t get much filled out as you can see. I didn’t even upload a pic of my ugly mug. So I was rather puzzled when yesterday I started getting comments on my profile. Didn’t take me long to figure out why. I got the following message:

Nigerian 419 scam, obviously. I got this same exact message several  times actually. “I am beautiful young girl with faithful, loving, tender and very caring.” What??!

But what really gave this spam dork away was “I saw your profile and i love it” Are you kidding me? Ha! 

I really hope palabea can put some tools in place for policing the site. I can’t stand this type of spam. It degrades the service.

Truth be told I didn’t get fooled cos I wear these.

Who knew I was so literate? Ok, so I don’t read every post on flexcoders. I do read every post on this flex user group though.

My Shared Items Are Here : http://www.google.com/reader/shared/03660126966680980338

My FriendFeed is here: http://friendfeed.com/brianholmes

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