Multiple AMF Django apps share a common gateway

A while back I wrote about a library called django-flashpolicies for providing a flexible remoting environment. Essentially, it frees up the root of your django project for whatever content you like while providing a crossdomain policy file there for remoting applications.

That is still one way to go, but as an advance on that, have a look at the Django-amf-gateway library.

The PyAMF team offers info on it as a way to structure a django project such that you can heap on all the apps you want and allow them to share a common http gateway. By simplifying gateway addresses on the server side django-amf-gateway simplifies resource management on the client side.

Works great in applicable cases.

RemoteObject Endpoints in Django

A few quick assumptions about your project:

• It's built with a lightweight proxy server such as nginx or lighttpd
  
• It utilizes the Django web framework
• It remotes data using some form of ORM
  
• It is presented via Flash/Flex

If this is the case, the simplest and most straightforward way to configure your gateway is by setting it at the root URL:

#my /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/mysite.conf
server {
         listen                    50.5.5.50:80;
         server_name      myurl.com www.myurl.com;
         if ($host = 'www.myurl.com' )    {
               rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://myurl.com/$1 permanent;
         }

         location / {
               proxy_pass    http://127.0.0.1:80/;
               include            /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
         }

         location /media/  {
                root                /home/django/domains/myurl.com/public_html/;
         }
}

Thus all web traffic that doesn't match '/media/' is passed to the urls.py for further processing. This is however at odds with your remoting requirements for Flash/Flex. To wit, you need a static file called crossdomain.xml to be available at your site's web root in order to meet the Flash client's security needs.

I looked for a good answer to this and found the Django-Flashpolicies by James Bennett effective and QUICK for this very purpose.

All you will need to do, essentially, is this:

easy_install django-flashpolicies

...and this...

url(r^'crossdomain.xml$',
  'flashpolicies.views.simple',
  {'domains': ['media.example.com', 'api.example.com']}),

...and you're good to go. Works better than a savage karate chop to the nose, most of the time anyway.

Hope that allows you to move forward quickly.