Overview

[fgf]

Can any one give me (and many others i'm sure) a summary of what you can do with communication sever and remoting stuff?

Particulary how does it compare to what you can to with flash and some serverside scripting.

fgf

[freddycodes]

Personally I think the only benefit would be the close interaction with ColdFusion MX, if you use it. And the video and audio broadcasting I believe can only be done with Flash Communication Server.

As for the whole remoting thing, I feel like it can be done without buying Flash Remoting or Flash Communication Server.

Basically all it does is open a socket connection with a server a, nd send binary data back and forth. You can do the same thing with PHP using wddx.

This is essentially flash remoting.
http://www.irq11.com/~louie/freddyServer/freddyServer.html

Its a socket connection to a socket server written in PHP. Data is passed back and forth over a direct socket instead of HTTP. Its essentially Flash Remoting. But it goes a step further and allows you to call objects and their methods that have been written in PHP from the the flash movie.

I say don't waste your money unless you need to do video conferencing or something, or your model is based on ColdFusion MX.

[flashboy]

im interested in building a little chat/video/audio client server app that seems to be exactly what mx communicator was built for. i know how to build chat apps in flash using xml sockets. using this method, is it possible for me to somehow pass video (source = web cam) and audio (source = mic) the same way, or do i need to install mx communicator on the server?

thanks,
:)

[freddycodes]

AS far as I can tell until someone breaks the .FLV file format like they have done with AMF, you'll need the Communication Server. But considering the time it took to break the amf format, it shouldn't be long before we see an open source method for passing audio/video to the server.