DotCloud.js - Access Cloud Services from the Browser

DotCloud.js - Access Cloud Services from the Browser(js.dotcloud.com)

53 points by gabrielgrant 13 years ago | 16 comments

ww520 13 years ago |

I've looked at the client-side cloud API from time to time and I'm never comfortable with embedding my key/secret credential in the Javascript code. Anyone having access to the client code in the browser, which is everyone, will have access to my secret credential.

If anyone has an idea to deal with this, please elaborate.

joffreyf 13 years ago | |

Hi, I'm one of the developers who's been working on this project at dotCloud, and more specifically on the twitter service. The example you're citing shows what I figured was the shortest way to try out the twitter API integration. And you're absolutely right for saying that as soon as your app goes public, it sucks.

This is why this call only has to be made one time ; the key and secret are then securely persisted into the database and the consumer secret can be ommitted in all subsequent calls. Alternatively, we also provide an API endpoint that you can just curl to provide the consumer key/secret. Our "detailed" documentation (http://js.dotcloud.com/doc.html#c4) is more thorough on that matter.

Hope that answers your question!

Edit: sorry for the late response, happened to be out of town for the last three days. Bad timing. :(

clintjhill 13 years ago | |

I've thought about this too. For me it's a matter of what somebody really "gets" with those keys. If I'm compromised by someone whose taken my keys and programmed a script against my service are they stealing anything? Well if I've applied some form of ACL and provided some secondary authentication against data they shouldn't be able to query I should be Ok.

Likewise with user accounts. If they take my keys, and somehow get someones password they'd have the same access they would otherwise have through the GUI. If I put user passwords into the code, well yeah that's totally bad on me.

I don't know. I'm not a security expert, however I've not been able to catch a problem with this. I'd love to know better.

joffreyf 13 years ago | | |

I guess one of the most basic problems that could occur is someone using your keys to make unauthenticated requests and exhaust your rate limit.

nodesocket 13 years ago |

Another entry into this space. Others include:

Meteor - http://www.meteor.com/ FireBase - http://www.firebase.com Parse - https://parse.com/docs/js_guide

gabrielgrant 13 years ago | |

I see there being two, somewhat distinct, categories of players: those with a realtime-first, focus (Meteor, Firebase and, now, dotCloud.js) and those that take more of a traditional REST-based approach (Parse, StackMob, Backlift, etc.).

The later have an easier time integrating into existing client-side frameworks (Backbone, Ember, Angular, etc), since those mostly seem to be built with a REST-based model in mind, but it will be interesting to see what patterns emerge to plug push-based updates into these pull-oriented systems. For starters, I suspect we'll need the client-side frameworks to clarify the distinction between the server and client state and the source of changes. Henrik Joreteg's talk at BackboneConf[1] was good overview of this and other problems they've run into.

[1]: https://speakerdeck.com/u/henrikjoreteg/p/real-world-realtim...

m0th87 13 years ago | |

Flattering that you should compare us to them, but this is an early-stage experiment, and we're not quite sure how it'll play out yet!

bmnick 13 years ago | |

CloudMine - https://cloudmine.me/ is similar, but more aimed at mobile...

KaoruAoiShiho 13 years ago | |

https://www.backlift.com/index.html

dsk2012 13 years ago |

What's the security model?

joffreyf 13 years ago | |

Hey, this is a very good question. We're currently working out an auth solution that we'll implement directly at the transport level. We haven't figured out every detail yet, but we'll be sure to give more insight on that matter as soon as possible - we understand how important it is as soon as we leave the realm of toy apps.

trotsky 13 years ago |

if you close the video using the (x) on the lightbox the video disappears but you still hear the audio - you have to navigate off the page to silence it.

m0th87 13 years ago | |

What browser / OS are you using? I haven't been able to reproduce it yet.

pud 13 years ago | | |

I encountered this problem on one of my sites.

The solution was -- rather than using the video player's API to stop or pause the video -- I had to remove the video entirely from the DOM with Jquery.remove()

trotsky 13 years ago | | |

Chromium 18.0.1025.151 (Developer Build 130497 Linux) Ubuntu 12.04

plugins set to click to play

KenCochrane 13 years ago | |

It worked fine for me, what browser you using? I have chrome on a mac.