Accessing caller web in SharePoint hosted app (SP2013 Preview)
SharePoint apps are hot topic these days, after Microsoft announced that they will be preferred development model for next major version of SharePoint products – known as SharePoint 2013. Applications will be purchased/downloaded from Office Store, or from corporate application catalog. There are 3 application models, depending on the fact where the real app code is hosted:
- provider-hosted app
- autohosted app
- SharePoint hosted app
In first two cases, application code is hosted outside of SharePoint, on some kind of remote server, either on classic hosting (provider-hosted) or in Windows Azure (autohosted). In these two cases, application communicates with SharePoint using SharePoint CSOM or by using REST to access data stored on SharePoint. They can be developed using any server-side technology which supports REST for the purpose of communication with SharePoint for data manipulation.
In third case, when application is hosted on SharePoint, it is actually hosted on dedicated SharePoint web application and isolated from the caller SharePoint web. Specific to SharePoint hosted apps is that they support only client-side technologies for development, which means that they are intended to use JavaScript client-side object model libraries in SharePoint 2013. Microsoft also announced web-based development tools for SharePoint 2013/Office app development, called “Napa app”.