IDAT210 - Public Access

In order to give my Facebook page members some understanding of what they were contributing I was planning to upload the application to the internet somewhere, either as a Facebook app, or as a page on my website which the members could navigate to.  This way after posting, users could see how their contribution was used and how it changed/developed the 'sound of social networking'.  However on beginning to try and implement this I came across one major flaw.  Flash security settings are awkward in that on a local machine a swf needs specific access from the Flash Player to access any address outside the local machine, and that similarly when posted online the swf simply is unable to achieve any remote access to an address other than that of the server it is currently running from.  This meant that to be able to post my project application online so that it would run, I would need to access the remote information somehow else other than through Flash.  After doing some research I found one way to do this is to use a small PHP script to pull in the data which can then be accessed by the swf.  I therefore went ahead and tried to implement this solution only to find that my web space does not support PHP and so I could not upload it to a space online in which it would work. 

This left me with one other option.  In terms of the local device security this is true for swf files but not if the application is exported as an exe or mac app file.  I therefore went ahead and exported the file in these formats which can then be uploaded to my space and downloaded by others who can then run it locally on their computers.  This provides a slightly long winded access for the Facebook page members and others but does allow users to view the project, which therefore meets my ultimate objective, if a little bit awkwardly.