How do these guys make Flash access the clipboard and file IO?

Question

Adobe Flash has some interesting and, at times, frustrating security rules that prevent lots of things from happening, like writing files to disk.

Swf Studio and Flash Jester allow Flash to "break out" of the security sandbox that prevents file IO operations. How are these programs written? Is this something that I can do in any of the .NET languages? Is there an API that I can use? (I'd rather not pay these guys money that I can't afford...)

Do these guys use an undocumented API? (If yes, how can I learn about the said API?)

Answer 1

Yes, I would say that you can do it yourself in .Net, and it's not very hard to get the grip of.

I don't know exactly how Swf Studio and Flash Jester do it, how they provide an API for ActionScript, but if what you are after is to build a Flash wrapper that enables file IO and such (in a desktop environment, not a web browser), it can be done using ActionScript's ExternalInterface.

I have done some stuff like that myself, a couple of years ago, for a digital signage application built on .Net/C# and Flash. Basically the Flash Player ActiveX control and the container application communicates using a protocol base on XML-RPC. Here are some basic examples:

http://blog.another-d-mention.ro/tag/external-interface/