Re: OpenAMF vs Flash MX's internal support for web services.

> enterprise application. I still haven't decided between (1) Flash + Remoting 
> or (2) Flex / Laszlo,

These aren't incompatible. Flex/Laslo are a way of server side generating
whatever *.swf lives in the browser. Remoting is just an option to pass data
back and forth between the *swf (running in the browser) and the server. There
are several options,  XML, XMLSocket or loadVars, or in Flex/Laslo generating a
new movie.

> (1) Why would I use the server side Flash Remoting component (or OpenAMF)
> to talk to a _web service_ when this can be done _directly_ from Flash MX
> PROFESSIONAL (if I understand correctly)?

I'm a little confused as to your question. Servers don't usually use
FlashRemoting to talk to each other (though ColdFusion does have this option)
but if they did, (2) Remoting is a efficent protocol, far quicker than XML as
it's not as verbose. e.g. here's a person object 

<person class="com.blah.person" name="SomeOne" age="23" description="a real
pain in the arse I've known since high school"/>

if you have 50 people in a request your sending back each of those would be
identical as the above minus the data changes, meaning you'd have 50
"description=''". It's really not necessary to send human readible data to
everything everytime so protocols like Remoting do away with packaging as much
as possible. Second everything in XML is sent as characters strings which means
every piece of data has to be converted into an appropriate string value
(strings are large) and back.

From the client's perspective of talking to a server with webservice accessible
(e.g. google) or your server which is consuming the same webserver.
Performance, mixing results with other data (e.g google results with amazon
book results) caching, and dross domain issues, the client can't load any data
from just anywhere.

> (3) Can I implement method level (or object level) security 

yes.  But no I don't think it's built in to the degree you need. There is a xml
config file which determines what methods are accessible by flash clients. The
gateway itself is a servlet, with source code available, and can be either
customized or subclasses to gain session and security handling appropriate to
your application and that class subclassed to do whatever application logic
handling you'd like so your not checking session every call. 

> (5) Can I construct a UI using Flash + OpenAMF which looks as professional 
> and integrates as well with server side components as I could with Flex? Is 
> the Flash IDE set up for UI design or is it more suited to animations?

OpenAMF has nothing to do with a creation of a UI, just it's data. It's more
probable in my opinion that Flash IDE is easier to work with to create complex
user interfaces, but I haven't used Flex before, nor do I really need that
capability to construct a UI out of whatever XML. None of the applications I
use change that much, or at least in a fashion that I can't do with appropriate
architecture design.


=====
Troy Gardner -"How you live your seconds, is how you live your days, is how you live your life..."

http://www.troygardner.com -my world
http://www.troyworks.com - building Rich Internet Applications
http://www.intrio.com -helping bridge the gap between the humans and machines. Home of the Flickey™


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