I need my client to check if the user connection with my server is strong or weak or etc, so i searched a lot and i think using URLLoader may be the answer:
I need to ping to an network with flash or actionscript
Is there a better way or this should do it?
The only thing using a URLLoader will tell you is if the device has a connection to that server or not. There is no in between, as you seem to desire. Additionally, if the requested server is down or slow (and Flash times out), your app will think it has no connection to the internet at all.
If you are using Adobe AIR, I suggest looking for an AIR Native Extension (commonly abbreviated to ANE) that does this. FreshPlanet has one called "ANE-Network-Info" that provides a way for iOS and Android apps to read if they have a network connection or not, though no way to get signal strength. Do some searching and you will probably find one, at least for iOS and/or Android.
If this isn't an AIR app, there's not much you can do. I suggest you treat it as any other website. If the connection drops or is weak, that's the problem of the client, not yours. If a request to a server fails, alert them. Beyond that, I don't think there is much else you can do.
Related
I'm creating a game with HTML5 and javascript, but am having trouble finding a way to get networking working.
What I want is for one instance of the game to listen on a Websockets/http stack, while the other instances connect to it.
So far, I'm yet to find any way of doing it that doesn't require additional plugins or online services. (ie: Flash or silver light opening the socket and pumping messages back - Something that isn't acceptable for mobile, or an online server like Player.IO, which while much better than Flash, wouldn't work for Wifi networks that are disconnected from the Internet)
While the latter option is a compromise I'm willing to make, I was wondering if it's one I need to make, or if I could survive without it.
Well, if I understand what you are trying to, hope to be right.
Client One:
Plays game, listens to incoming data from Client Two
Client Two:
Plays game, connects to Client One
I'm guessing it's a P2P game? If this is the case, I think you want to look at WebRTC.
Otherwise, peer-to-peer is not really possible unless you run a mediator service that both clients connect to and handle it as a dispatcher.
I am trying to figure out a way to do an internet connectivity check for an AIR for iOS app. Previously, I was using (against my better judgement) a URLMonitor that checked Google once every 30 seconds. I did not like putting that load onto Google and neither did they; this morning, our network got flagged as a possible DDoS attacker simply from testing the app. So I had to disable this type of check and move on.
I have thought about using the NetworkInfo ANE from Adobe, but that presents its own issues in determining internet connectivity. The only way I can think of doing it is to check for interfaces "en0" and "pdpxx" (which correspond to WiFi and Cellular interfaces, respectively) and check their IPs to ensure they are not in the 192.168.x.x, 10.10.x.x, or 127.0.x.x ranges. However, I am not entirely sure those are the only static router/localhost IPs out there and there is always the possibility that the network interface names will change in the future, which would render this monitor useless. There is also the issue of IPv6 possibly throwing a wrench into this method as well.
Is there another way to check if the user is connected to the internet? I've searched multiple times and it seems that these are the only two ways to check. If that is the case, what is the best way to check?
I'm surprised that you got flagged as a DDoS attacker, are you sure that's what happened?
In any case, if your not happy with putting the load onto someone else's server, then make your own server, just a basic setup that you use with the URLMonitor. You don't have to use google's url with the URLMonitor, you can pass it another URLRequest, which could point to your own server.
monitor = new URLMonitor(new URLRequest("http://www.you-own-server.com"));
This might also be useful if you decide that you want to pass more data between the app and the server. It's your server, so can do what you want with it.
I don't think there's any other way to check if the user is connected to the internet. To be honest, I don't see why there would be. Checking for the users interfaces/wan0 etc... probably would be possible, but you'd need another program, maybe a simple python or c++ program, that Air could use to check these things, but that sounds like the long way round.
Is there a way to register code to be run when Flash is about to close (e.g., when the user closes the browser or when DOM manipulation causes the embedded player to be removed)?
In particular, I'd like for my application to send a closing packet to a remote service so the user's peers know that the user has no chance of coming back without having to wait for a timeout. I'm using URLLoader and URLRequest to maintain a BOSH connection, so I welcome solutions applicable to this specific case. However, if there are NetConnection-specific solutions, I'm sure I can learn from them too.
I'm happy to accept that this callback won't be run on a kill -9 but it would be nice to have the more graceful exit paths allow for some code execution.
It seems like the better solution would be to do this via the server side no? The server should be able to detect the disconnection, where you could then invalidate the session.
However, you could go with a client/socket based solution, albeit much more overhead. Using FMS or some other rtm real time server you could dispatch events to your web server that a connection has dropped, (though you might have issues in the case of low network connectivity, or an internet drop). I would suggest going against this though, as in my experience, FMS sucks :)
Is setting extremely low timeouts not a possibility? (i.e. < 10 seconds)
My Requirements are similar to this old question of 2009. I am just re-posting since OP is kind of 2 years old and the question is closed now.
How can I transmit live video Stream over a Socket using Flex / ActionScript 3.0 ?
I am developing an application which works on P2P architecture so I cant use FMS for live media streaming. I have read about NetConnection and NetStream classes but cant start using them since all the examples are using FMS. How I do this ?
Secondly, I also need a suitable library / tool / technique to encode (& than decode) video frames before displaying & transmitting. For this I have read X264 codec but using this with Flex seems too complicated. Any other alternatives ?
Any tutorial / blog will be of great help...
You can send data directly to a remote machine; yet, that machine would need to be listening, and unless you are using Air, that machine would need a socket policy file. Obviously not being able to connect multiple machines directly to each other without a policy file, forces you to have a central server, and prevents straight forward implementations of in browser p2p chat/video/(w/e) applications.
So you have to have a central server; however, you don't have to pay for one.
I knew I had read about this somewhere, so I searched google and came up with the links below.
http://haxe.org/doc/flash/peer2peer
https://github.com/OpenRTMFP/Cumulus
All you need is a developer key, that Adobe gives away for free at:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=stratus
With the above being said, you will need to know some c++, in order to take proper advantage of this.
If you want to learn how to do something basic to get you started, and you are really just interested in developing something for your local network, then these articles tell you how to do RTMFP as a multicast Group:
http://www.flashrealtime.com/videotutorial-remote-device-controller/
http://www.flashrealtime.com/local-flash-peer-to-peer-communication-over-lan-without-cirrus/
[EDIT: the content for the last two links, as the site removed those pages, can currently be found using the waybackmachine and the snapshots around early 2011]
There is a ton of stuff that you can do with the information above; yet, I would start small.
You will need anyway a media server, either FMS or SmartFox or else and have both parties connecting to the server. It will also be dealing with the encoding. I don't think you can do that without a media server in between...
Is there a reliable way of preventing my actionscript code (as2 or as3) from being copied (e.g. if there's some IP in it)?
I know there are tools that can decompile flash code so it's easily reverse-engineered and I've also seen a few tools that claim to be able to obfuscate actionscript code in such a way that it's not steal-able, but I wonder how reliable they are...
Do you know? Thanks!
It is by definition imposible to prevent it.
The reason is simple, the code needs to run on the client, so the client needs to be able to read it.
The best you can do is to make so hard (time demanding) to do that it's not profitble.
Flash has a built in feature to protect againt decompiling with a password. I'm not sure exactly how it works, I guess some form of encryption.
You can try and spil sensetive data up and join it at runtime, og encrypt it and get the descryption key from the server.
But in the end there's nothing you can really do. Unless you wan't the users to input the encryption key (password or a file).
There is no build in encryption in Flash but there is a couple of free librarys like crypto lib http://code.google.com/p/as3crypto/.
I've found no reliable and sustainable way to obfuscate the code. If there's a way to obfuscate the code, I'd bet that:
it would affect the performance of your code
it would be just a matter of time before someone makes/finds a decompiler for that obfuscation method
I wouldn't consider a good practice to rely on the security of your client code. Even if the code couldn't be decompiled, the swf is run on the client and communicates with the Internet via a network connection the user has access to. The packets can be sniffed and all the data that's being transfered can be easily analyzed.
I think you should find a way to develop a secure application, even considering that the client knows everything you do. You should try to use server-side constraints and filter all inputs before using them. Also, requesting all the sensitive data from a server-side script, instead of embedding it in your AS code could be a good start.