Powering Flash Applications with a Server, Part 2—Flash Remoting

n part 1 of this series, I discussed various ways to connect a Flash application to a server. Why? Connecting Flash to a server allows for more robust, dynamic, and useful applications than is otherwise possible. More and more companies are replacing traditional Web applications on intranets, extranets and public sites with rich Internet apps, providing the interactivity and responsiveness of a client-server application with the fully distributed nature of an Internet application. To make this possible, it is necessary to integrate external data.

Introducing Flash Remoting
Flash Remoting allows data to be exchanged between a Flash Player and an application server using a format called AMF (ActionScript Messaging Format), which is a Macromedia proprietary binary format based on SOAP. On the client side, native Flash objects are sent by the Player to the Flash Remoting gateway using AMF. At the gateway, they are serialized into native objects for the application server and passed on to the appropriate server-side services.