Amf-php

[freddycodes]

With regards to the news item on the front page of this site about Flash remoting with PHP (amf-php). I am wondering at least for developers who are US citizens. Is anyone else concerned about using this, since the AMF format that Macromedia developed and copyrighted was reverse-engineered without their permission? I am sure they are not too happy about it, and I for one am being very cautious about using this in any for-profit project. How does everyone else feel about it?

[jimburton]

scuse my ignorance freddy...I presume the AMF format is that used by the flashComm server to handle traffic between cf scripts and movies is it? And amf-php will act in much the same way as the flashcomm server?

I don't know enough about this to comment really...so here goes :) I would imagine that mm would be reasonably happy about something that enhances the use of their biggest product with prolly the webs biggest & fastest growing language...it's not like they have a product on the market to do this or are ever likely to develop 1, cos php developers would be unlikely to shell out for it....

I take it you see it as an infringement of some sort then?

[freddycodes]

Jim,

Don't get me wrong, I would love it that were the case, but don't you see Macromedia having a hard time with it if you could essentially pull off for free what they sell Flash Communication Server for.


And amf-php will act in much the same way as the flashcomm server


I mean it isn't acting like it, it is it, they reverse-engineered the AMF format which is a proprietary binary format that MM developed. I am just thinking that they might not be happy if people could do the same thing without having to buy their product.

[jimburton]

they reverse-engineered the AMF format which is a proprietary binary format that MM developed

well, that's the key thing then - if that's the case then I'd imagine mm would be pretty dischuffed...but I still don't think they should be worried - take your point about doing the same thing as one of their products does for free - even though coldfusion is a very expensive product up against php and, with a different context, asp, it does more than OK - people buy it for a set of reasons and maybe the same people are likely to prefer the mm implementation of amf over some techy command line stuff they don't understand...plus, the people who use amf-php will still be mm customers as they're using flash and mm aren't in competition with the OS movement.....(I hope that's not how they see themselves anyway) still, if it's a copyright violation then that's not the point....

[freddycodes]

Yeah I see your point. Funny thing is MM has not yet commented on it yet. I am anxious to see what they have to say. Its been out for a while, and noone in the MM community is talking about it.

[jimburton]

did you catch this newsitem on actionscript.com freddy? - http://www.actionscript.com/archives/00000443.html - I'm looking forward to having a go with this actually, never really though about the amount of code we write to serialize/extract data and what it'd be like without that need...be interesting to see if anyone from mm posts on that article, they often seem to at that site,

[freddycodes]

I would love to see their reaction. If they give it the okay you bet I will be jumping all over it. Until then I will stick to my WDDX and XMLSockets.

Did you download the thing yet jim? It seems like an awful lot of code, I am gonne run some speed tests to see which is faster.


I just can't think MM will be too thrilled they stand lose out on some money, IMO.

[jimburton]

I am gonne run some speed tests to see which is faster.
nice one, keep us informed:)

[freddycodes]

Jim

So I ported my WDDX example over to amfphp format and it seems to run about the same, except it uses the builtin remoting functions to connect and send and receive. I still think for realtime communications the socket is going to be faster, but I did this so I could get a handle on how it works.
http://www.irq11.com/~louie/freddyServer2/freddyServer.html