Amazon S3 + Dojo July 3rd, 2008 at 12:03 am by Kris Zyp
Dojo’s improved RPC and new REST services can be used with a wide array of web services. One particular use is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Dojo can connect to Amazon S3’s with a trivial proxy and be used as a normal RPC service. Not only that, Amazon S3 is a REST service and therefore it can be used as a data store with Dojo’s new REST implementation of dojo.data, JsonRestStore. You can read and write to your S3 database using the convenient Dojo Data API, and use the data store in Dojo widgets.
Getting Started
To get started with Dojo + S3:
- First, you must be signed up to use Amazon S3.
- Dojo uses a simple proxy to communicate with S3 (doing so directly from the browser would be insecure). The proxy PHP script, proxy.example-php, located in /dojox/rpc/s3/, must be renamed to proxy.php to be used.
- The proxy requires PHP 5 (other languages hopefully will be added) and the following modules:
- Next you must enter your Amazon access key and secret access key into the proxy.php file on line 3 and 4:
$accessKey = "access key"; $secretAccessKey = "secret access key";
Now we can start using Dojo services to connect to S3. You use the Dojo RPC service with the “PROXIED-PATH” envelope:
dojo.require("dojox.rpc.Service"); dojo.require("dojox.rpc.ProxiedPath"); var s3Buckets = new dojox.rpc.Service({ target:"http://s3.amazonaws.com/", proxyUrl:"../s3/proxy.php", // the path to the proxy transport:"REST", envelope:"PROXIED-PATH", contentType:"application/json", services:{ myBucket:{ // name of the service (usually the bucket) target:"myBucket", // enter you bucket here parameters:[{type:"string"}] } } });
To use the S3 as a Dojo data store you can use the S3Store module. First setup an RPC service as shown above and then pass the RPC service to the S3JsonRestStore:
dojo.require("dojox.data.S3Store"); // and create a store for it s3Store = new dojox.data.S3Store({service:s3Buckets.myBucket});
You can then use the s3Store as a normal Read/Write Dojo Data store. And since the S3Store is an extension of the JsonRestStore, you can use all the additional features of that store including fast, compact syntax, referencing, and offline capabilities are coming soon. With the S3Store you can build sophisticated apps with very thin server architecture; UI logic can be handled on the browser, and database storage can be delegated to Amazon’s S3. This is just one of the many new features available with Dojo 1.2.
Posted July 19th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Is it possible to use Google Gears and/or a very lightweight server as the proxy and to maintain security?
Posted July 19th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Sorry, I didn’t type that right….
Is it possible to use Google Gears (Dojo off-line), GreaseMonkey (to inject JavaScript data without putting it on the server), and/or a very lightweight server *running locally* as the proxy and to still maintain security?
This would be great for delivering rich applications via Amazon S3, without having a dedicated CPU.
Posted July 20th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I don’t see how Gears, GreaseMonkey, or a local proxy would enable you to create a secure client-side only application. As with application (web-based or natively executing), client side code can always be reverse engineered. Any controlled access action/resource must have authorization from a server in order to maintain security.
Another issue with using S3 directly from a browser (without a server side proxy) is there is no way to send the HTTP requests (and receive the responses) from the browser because of some-origin restrictions.
Do you have something else in mind?
Posted July 29th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
If the accessKey and secretAccessKey are stored locally, what does it matter if the application is reverse engineered? My concept is that you make those user inputs such that they could use their own S3 storage, providing persistent, backed-up, almost limitless, and available-world-wide storage. If the desire is to use the S3 storage of the application author, then putting those keys on the web application author’s host is the obvious way to go.
Posted July 30th, 2008 at 2:16 am
>>> Another issue with using S3 directly from a browser (without a server side proxy) is there is no way to send the HTTP requests (and receive the responses) from the browser because of some-origin restrictions.
You can use the S3 POST API from browser without any hassle, atleast for uploads.
>> database storage can be delegated to Amazon’s S3.
How do you handle the 5 GB limit ?
Posted July 30th, 2008 at 2:43 am
>> This would be great for delivering rich applications via Amazon S3, without having a dedicated CPU.
If you are connected to S3, I see no reason why apps should be offline. Why cant you be directly connected ?
Posted July 30th, 2008 at 7:16 am
@Jadon: I was definitely assuming that the application author’s S3 account would be the one be used. It would seem strange to me to build an application that requires users to go through the process of setting an S3 account, this seems like a process for devs to go through.
Posted October 6th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
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