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Adobe DevNet publishes my blueprint for Flex apps

Wow! I’ve been so busy that I actually forgot to blog about something nice that happened: Adobe has published an article by me, outlining a general architectural blueprint for Flex applications that adapts MVC-style patterns in a nice way. The article is available at
An architectural blueprint for Flex applications on adobe.com.

This article is based largely on a talk I presented at MAX 2006 on this approach. Writing it required that I reduce a lot of partly-improvised speaking (and some useful semi-animated interaction diagrams) into cold hard words on a page and static illustrations. On the flip side, I could be much more explicit with code samples, and take the time to explain some things more clearly.

The prop for all this explanation remains my ReviewTube mashup application. There’s been a lot of activity on that app lately, which is gratifying.

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Abrupt YouTube security policy change

There was a brief glitch in ReviewTube operation this last week, as the fallout from an unexpected YouTube security policy change.

Some links:

• CSRF exploits and crossdomain.xml
• Death of open crossdomain.xml’s?
• YouTube, crossdomain

Possibly due to an exploit, they abruptly changed their crossdomain.xml file to only allow access from the youtube.com domain. As a result, YouTube developer API calls from Flash no longer work if the SWF was downloaded from a non-youtube.com domain. This broke a few aspects of ReviewTube that used that API.

I quickly got around the problem by proxying the YouTube requests through my own web server. Recall that ReviewTube was created to demonstrate an architecture for remote Flex applications. Well, in a validation of that architecture, it took changes to about 3 lines in 3 source files to make this change. Two changes were to code in the Service layer, and one change was to the component configuration file. (Full disclosure: also about 10 new lines of Rails code on the server side to do the proxying.)

So… we’re back live.

YouTube, if you want to be safe and not screw up Flash/Flex developers, please move your API to a different domain and put a liberal crossdomain.xml on that host. Thanks.

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