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

> O.k, in that case why is Flex such a better way of generating a Flash file 
> than the standard way

Fla's are binary files thus aren't particularly ameniable to team development
or turning off or on features. Flex is a server side method that allows easier
team useage as it's all based on XML which CVS like tools can diff and merge
etc. 

 The advantage to Flex is the person gets sent to them only what they need 
(rather than in actionscript downloading everything and turning things on and
off and doing all sorts of placement on the fly on the client)eg. It's somewhat
like Generator with more flexibility. 

Example 1:www.sampleDramaticCustomization.com 

one person with  a low end account gets 1/4 the features custom built for them
in a personone.swf with local weather/news pics inside the swf, while person2
with the 'pro' account gets a completely different swf with all their custom
layout *already formatted _in_ the swf* saved a few different components built
in. If you have a site that changes structurally often then Flex's power may
come in handy but as you've seen at a price (both in upfront and server
overhaed generation costs),(though probably no more overhead than a JSP/PHP
page of similar complexity). $12K would be hard to justify, until you find out
that the Flash is version 4 and runs on a Cellphone/PDA which doens't have
actionscript capabilities or fast XML parsing (nor remoting for that matter).

Example 2: www.sampleCustomFlashWebsitesForYou.com

 user via a selects some options (like a paypal shopping cart, photogallery,
etc) via a normal Flash IDE generated wizard, which uploads some XML for an
entire flash based website to be created custom to them and Flex spits out the
entire site as they've specified in the form of a zip which they can download
and put on their own site in the matter of minutes. Which would be impossble
with only a Flash IDE, and if your business is making templitized 50 websites a
day for $10 each a compelling way to go, and $12K paid back in a reasonable
time. There are other Code->swf makers though do a search for Ming.

 Further questions on Flex should probably be directed at a Flex sales
engineer.

RE: Servers consuming Webservices instead of clients.
We covered this last time. 

Speed. 
You can't use remoting with other webservices, only XML. I think you already
understand if it's in your control remoting is far more efficent than XML. But
really it depends on your application.

Why have your clients consume mutliple XML (and thus when hitting the page have
to wait, and wait on their servers) if it hasn't changed and is coming from
someplace way far away from them when when you can cache it locally for
multiple users and get it to the client 10x faster using remoting? 

Control:

whatever you load from wherever else is no longer as easy to control or add.
Say  you want to mix multiple webservices (say aggregate 15 blogs) it's much
faster to do this on the server with huge resources than in the memory of the
client.

Cost:
if the webservice isn't free, 1 hit versus 1000's.


> efficient than textual ones (i.e. XML). Does anyone else think that XML is 
> slightly overused as a technology?

Yes, but it was never meant to be a high performance option, it was meant to be
an least common denominator type option where others didn't exist. it's a)
human readible useful at times, e.g. I can give you an XML doc and you can read
it without a DTD/spec guidance b) standardizes parsers/writers, else we are
arguing over what byte is the end of line, etc.

> o.k, so are you saying that if I don't use remoting (AMF) and just stick to 
> the standard, built in capability of Flash to communicate with web services 
> then I can only communicate with web services which reside on the server 
> from where the SWF file was loaded (similar restrictions to applets)?

yes, depending. Read up on "cross domain policy" eg.
http://www.moock.org/asdg/technotes/crossDomainPolicyFiles/


> What I'm looking for is a system which allows me to limit only users who 
> have a certain role (e.g. administrator) to access certain methods. Also, I 
> don't want to implement logic in each method to check access rights and 
> validate credentials.

This is going to be up to you to define.  I have done this before, ahere are
many possible security schemes out there you can assemble what you need. (e.g.
is admin a Java Object, or a Unix user, etc). You might lookin into things like
Tomcat's "Security Realms" http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2001/07/24/tomcat.html

=====
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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