(Original creator: eknochs)
Last month I uploaded a that showed how to call an Amazon Web Services RESTful API, in particular for their S3 storage service. That sample is contained within a single form, and is accompanied by some simple instructions and notes on assumptions made etc. I used a form component type, and constructed it to use operations for the actual API calls, so that it would be easy to understand, and easy to modify to a service component, for wider usage.
The next thing I wanted to try was to provide the same functionality from a DSP. Initially this could have meant replacing the Windows GUI layer with a HTML5 based layer in a DSP. However, DSPs make the Uniface JavaScript API available, and thus there is an opportunity to try out the AWS SDK for JavaScript (in the Browser). Information is available at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/guide/browser-intro.html .
The main advantage of using this SDK is that becomes possible to avoid a lot of low level coding with the RESTful API. If you study the form sample I mentioned earlier, you will see a lot of code to build canonical requests, and then to sign them securely. This is all buried inside the various SDKs that AWS provides. This was worth a try! As it turned out, coding the JavaScript to list the bucket contents, download and upload files, was relatively easy. In particular, the feature to generate signed URLs for downloading files is very handy. In fact most of the buttons on the sample DSP have browser side JavaScript which calls the AWS SDK without much reference to the Uniface JavaScript API. This just means that in some circumstances you might not need to use DSPs at all, but if your use case does involve exchanging information with back-end processes, then this sample should be of interest. One such use-case is to save S3 files on the back-end server, and so a JavaScript activate is done to send the signed URL to a DSP operation, to complete the download. In any case, it is tidy to keep the JavaScript code in the Uniface repository as much as possible.
So … although the JavaScript coding turned out easy enough, the challenge turned out to be how to authenticate the SDK calls. In the form sample I used the AWS Access Key ID and a Secret Access Key to sign requests. These were quarantined from the form source code, and the runtime user (who shouldn’t have access to the Uniface debugger), by storing the sensitive data in assignment file logicals. Not the ultimate form of protection, but adequate for my sample. The JavaScript SDK requires access to these artifacts, and since this runs in the browser, it exposes them to all users. To slightly obscure these private values, I placed them in a separate JavaScript file, which is not referred to in the HTML, but dynamically loaded by Uniface with this statement:
$webinfo("JAVASCRIPT") = "../js/aws_config.js" Of course you can read the variable contents with any browser debugger. So this DSP sample comes with a similar caveat to the AWS recommendations.
The options for supplying credentials to the AWS JavaScript API are described here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/guide/browser-configuring.html . So for my sample I did effectively supply hard-coded credentials for an IAM user that has read-only permissions. Real applications will want a more secure method. I was going to evaluate AWS Cognito, but it is not yet available in my region. Another option to investigate is to use Temporary Security Credentials, via the AWS Security Token Service. Further discussion on authenticating credentials is beyond the scope of this blog / sample. One final security configuration had to be made, because the sample is running within a browser, which is likely to be enforcing CORS. This is best explained in the documentation at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/guide/browser-configuring.html#Cross-Origin_Resource_Sharing__CORS_ .
To summarise, Uniface developers have a choice when integrating with AWS. They can choose the RESTful APIs for lower level control, in a wider set of situations, or they can use the JavaScript SDK for easier integration when using the Uniface JavaScript API.