Remoting for everyone
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.