Programming Flex 3

Chapter 17. Remote Data Communication

Remote data communication occurs at runtime. It does not reside strictly in the client, but requires network connections to send and receive data between the client and the server. Flex applications support a variety of remote data communication techniques built on standards. There are three basic categories of Flex application remote data communication:

HTTP request/response-style communication

This category consists of several overlapping techniques. Utilizing the Flex framework HTTPService component or the Flash Player API URLLoader class, you can send and load uncompressed data such as text blocks, URL encoded data, and XML packets. You can also send and receive SOAP packets using the Flex framework WebService component. And you can use a technology called Remoting to send and receive AMF packets, which use a binary protocol that is similar to SOAP (but is considerably smaller). Each technique achieves the similar goal of sending requests and receiving responses using HTTP or HTTPS. See http://www.jamesward.org/census for a comparison of various methods for loading data at runtime over HTTP.

Real-time communication

This category consists of persistent socket connections. Flash Player supports several types of general socket connections: those that require a specific format for packets (XMLSocket) and those that allow raw socket connections (Socket). In both cases, the socket connection is persistent between the client and the server, allowing ...