03.06.2018

How SmartNSF came to rescue in a heavily surveilled little (bird) house

Tags: Lotus Domino SmartNSF
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One small hobby project of mine is a birdbox with an wifi enabled IP Camera. Much more fun to watch those small house sparrows build their nest and see how hard they work to bring up new kiddo-birds Smile

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The images from the web camera surfaces on an web page, and everything worked fine last year.

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However, firing up the camera this year, nothing showed up! After a quick look at the Chrome console, I quickly realized that the old and trusty IFRAME no longer worked as it used to. First and foremost I have enabled SSL on the site (with Let's Encrypt, using Windows ACME Simple (WACS), I'll create a blog post on that too in the near future) and it turns out that HTTPS won't allow IFRAMEs to use HTTP-based content at all. The concept is called "Mixed Active Content", read more about that here if interested. The built in web server on the web camera can't use anything else but plain old http …

While there probably are many other solutions to this challenge (feel free to chime in if you know!), this article describes how I used SmartNSF to call a small java-class, wrapping the whole HTTP-call nice and easy. A side effect was that I also could hide the inner workings of the IP camera completely! No more user name and password exposed in HTML Smile.

If you don't know SmartNSF, it is very briefly an extension to both your Domino server and to your Designer client, enabling you to create powerful REST Services supporting full CRUD in minutes! While you of course can do much of the same with the built-in Domino Access Services (DAS), you have much better control with SmartNSF. In my opinion, one of the most important things to happen with Notes/Domino in years.

Read more to see how I enabled SmartNSF to solve this challenge!

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