March 09th 2003 | Jens C Brynildsen

Alternate Remoting?

Will there be open source Remoting for Flash? Several projects are on the way. Some of them perform quite well despite being just started and being in Pre-Alpha.

AMF is short for the ActionScript Message Format used by the Macromedia product Flash Remoting. Flash Remoting is a commercial product that allows your Flash movies to connect to data sources such as databases, datastreams and .NET services on the serverside. AMF is the format created by Macromedia that will let this information flow in a binary format between the server and the SWF file. Binary transfer is much faster than other transfers such as XML.

AMF is not an open format, but the lack of support for PHP and other web languages has spawned several projects to solve this. The AMF PHP project have downloadable files that will get you started, complete with examples. If you want to connect to Perl (installed on most UNIX-based servers), use FLAP. While none of these two solutions offer quite the same features as a Flash Remoting setup, they can solve several real-world tasks for Flash programmers.
Read more at JD on MX

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