Adobe opens up Flash Remoting (aka BlaszeDS) and the AMF protocol. How awesome is that? I've been a long time Remoting user and think it's the best way to go when you need data from a server. Although Adobe's offering is Java based, there are some really good PHP, .Net and other distributions. For more information on these check out The MidnightCoders, AMFPHP and OpenAMF.

Did you know that some of the most amazing server-side software for Flash is available for free? Most sever software products are available to developers for free with a 5 IP connection limit, but are full featured. Even with this limitation there are more than enough connections to be useful for learning how to take advantage of protocols like AMF and RTMP in your Flash applications.

You’ll probably want to set up a server as well, so re-purpose that old PC and install Linux on it to provide a separate server environment from your local development environment. Red Hat offers the latest version of it’s OS as Fedora Core, it’s easy to install, set-up and manage without having to do to much command-line.

Get your free software here:
Fedora Core
Flash Media Server
LiveCycle Data Services ES Express
WebOrb

Now there are no more excuses for not knowing how to use these tools to make your Flash as awesome as it can be. Having the skills to uses these tools is what could get you hired on my team! Good luck and happy coding.

Remoting is one of the coolest ways to get data from your server-side services or destinations as they are know in ActionScript. WebOrb was unbelievably easy to set-up and works great. In comparison to AMFPHP, it was considerably easier to set-up, required no modification to my PHP classes and has a very similar set-up to that of FDS. I found the documentation somewhat light, although the Quick Start guide was very helpful.

The only issue was an error in the WebOrb PHP code that is part of the install which generated this error message in the Eclipse console, "ReferenceError: Error #1056: Cannot create property isError on mx.messaging.AcknowledgeMessage." This seemed not to cause any problems when remoting except for the error message that kept showing up. Like any other anal developer I just couldn't have this, luckily the fix for this was fairly easy and I found it here. It was such a simple bug, I found it very surprising that Midnight Coders would release software with this error. Once I got past this everything has been perfect since.

So, what really made me choose WebOrb over AMFPHP? There are several reasons, but mainly the fact that it supports multiple languages and is upgradeable to include FDS comparable features for languages other than JAVA. Also they offer professional paid support, which can make a huge difference when deploying a large application for an important client and offer security features and a handy management console with the professional version. The final factor was that I found some good recommendations for its usage on sites that I respect and trust.