Flash, Twitter and crossdomain.xml

April 22nd, 2008

As part of the latest FRED website update, I’ve been asked to include a twitter feed integrated into the flash file itself. Not knowing much about twitter itself apart from the basics, like knowing I’d have to take data from a feed and have to make some actionscript that parses the XML, I started the necessary research to see what people had done before me.

It is fortunate then, that I stumbled across this post, Twitter Issues, which describes a scenario that is not unfamiliar to me. It also provides a solution which will ultimately save me time later on! Basically, since some major security updates in Flash quite a long while ago, it hasn’t been able to access data on any server different to the one it is hosted on without express permission from the other server in the form of a special file called crossdomain.xml. I had the same issue when developing the original FRED Roles database stored on one site and accessed via flash from the other. Now Twitter themselves could have solved the issue by simply using a * (star) in their file to allow access from anyone, but for whatever reason they chose not to.