Tech Blog

We’re using Eclipse as our main developing environment. For our Flash projects we’ve been using the opensource ActionScript Development Tool (ASDT) plugin in combination with HAMTASC.

On my iMac the combination of ASDT and HAMTASC isn’t working like it should (for example: code hinting isn’t working) so a couple of days ago I installed the Development Tool for Flash (FDT) plugin from PowerFlasher.

And man do I love it! I’m just starting to figure out all the possible options, but allready I think it’s much, much better than ASDT. I’m gonna test it some more for the next couple of days, but I’ll be happy to pay the € 199,- because I think it’s worth every penny of it!

Today I had (actually I still have) an issue with subdomains, SWF’s and Javascript. For the Floorplanner we communicate with our Flash application via Javascript (using ExternalInterface). On www.floorplanner.com everything works fine, but when I tried to use a subdomain (like whatever.floorplanner.com) an error appeared. First I thought it was a Javascript error, but it turned out to be the Flash Security Sandbox blocking the communication.

To solve this I added the following line to the Flash app:

System.security.allowDomain('http://whatever.floorplanner.com/');

It did the trick, but the thing is that every (paying) user can create and use its own subdomain, so i needed something like this:

System.security.allowDomain('http://*.floorplanner.com/');

That didn’t work. After trying all kinds of different things like crossdomain.xml, I settled with

System.security.allowDomain('*');

This feels like a really nasty hack, but it’s all I can come up with. There has to be a better way…

I really enjoyed reading The Pragmatic Programmer. It made me realise that there is still a lot to learn.