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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 4:07 am and is filed under ActionScript 3, Remoting, Flex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.