Different Remoting Implementations... Which is best?

[mskibbz]

Just wondering what people are using on commercial sites where lots of data needs to be transferred quickly.... MM looks average from what I hear, nothing great, nothing horrible but pricey. FlashOrb looks ok, but its still pricey at $800 a server. Is AMFPHP worth bothering with? I'm developing in MX 2004 7.2 and am looking for a faster, more reliable, more easily debugged, and more easily monitored alternative the LoadVars and the WebServiceConnector.... Ideally, I want to be able to monitor download progress and all. Could anyone point me in the right direction? I've never used remoting, but am a C# developer with lots of .NET remoting and web service experience that is working on my first Flash app.

Thanks

[mskibbz]

Money won't be an issue, performance and robustness are crucial though :)

[mskibbz]

C'mon now, there has to be some programmers out there with something to say on this :)

I've tried FlashOrb Pro 1.5 but there is a bug in it that prevents us from using it to go live, and we can't afford to wait until 2.0 is stable enough to deploy in a production environment. I think I may just go back to web services, they seemed faster and more reliable anyways, despite what people claim...

[madgett]

I use ColdFusion MX 7 with Flash Remoting, which comes native to that server-side script platform.

My advice is stay away from AMFPHP in a production environment. If you're deploying on .NET then you will have to purchase the Flash Remoting capabilities for that.

There is also just the native flash form posting (LoadVars.send | sendAndLoad) that doesn't require remoting and works fine as well.

[mskibbz]

I use ColdFusion MX 7 with Flash Remoting, which comes native to that server-side script platform.

My advice is stay away from AMFPHP in a production environment. If you're deploying on .NET then you will have to purchase the Flash Remoting capabilities for that.

There is also just the native flash form posting (LoadVars.send | sendAndLoad) that doesn't require remoting and works fine as well.

I am currently using XML.SendAndLoad and WebServices classes in my application. I tried using FlashOrb Pro 1.5 for .NET but it just wasn't robust enough for a commercial application that deals with rapid fire calls that each return hundreds of records - it kept crapping out on me. So you are saying that Macromedia's Remoting MX is more reliable than the 3rd party products? I was quite disappointed in FlashOrb's performance and reliability, they have docs claiming huge performance gains over SOAP web services but I actually saw a pretty large performance and reliabillity hit when I migrated my app from web services to remoting with FlashOrb.

At this point we are rolling ahead with .NET web services and are consuming them using the WebServices classes in AS2. I am hesitant to waste any more time trying Macromedia's flavor of remoting, would you rather use remoting in a commercial application over web services (assuming you have complete control over the server)?

Thanks a ton for your input! :)

[madgett]

Flash Remoting basically is a web service, the advantage with Remoting and ColdFusion is that it's native, it comes built into that platform so it's that much easier. Using the webservices classes should be efficient in comparison, the only difference is that the development process will most likely take longer because web services aren't native to the platform and communicating with the Flash Player (other than the built-in Flash classes). If you have solid web services then that should be fine, however, you might be interested in the free Developer editions of software that Macromedia offers, which includes ColdFusion / Flash Remoting and others. You could then experiment with them, the problem is that there is a downside if you aren't familiar with ColdFusion, then it wouldn't be worth it anyways.