> I haven't gotten into this a lot, but is the HTTP compression of soap
> an
> option in Flash?��Their argument with the memory leak information
> seemed
> like it was pretty solidly based.��I'm assuming that's just a Flash
> player issue?��Any explanation or further education would be greatly
> appreciated as I'm looking into these options now.
Compression addresses the verbosity of SOAP, but there are other things
to take into consideration:
1. The overhead of zipping and unzipping the XML. I have found this to
be minimal to negligible, but if I were basing a new project on this
type of communication, I would probably do some more tests just to be
certain.
2. The overhead of parsing (serializing and deserializing) SOAP
requests and responses on both the client and the server.
3. The overhead in generating binary AMF responses on the server (this
isn't an issue on the client because the Flash player doesn't have to
deserialize AMF).
My experience is that Flash Remoting is slightly faster, but I don't
have definitive numbers. I would encourage anyone weighing the pros
and cons of the two to set up some simple performance tests and decide
for yourself. Published benchmarks and personal anecdotes have too
much potential to be biased or just plain wrong.
Other things to consider:
1. SOAP is obviously an open format and will make your projects more
portable. For some, that's an important consideration, and for some,
it's not.
2. Not all browsers support Flash Remoting. Last time I checked,
Mozilla and Opera were not compatible. Hopefully that's changed by now
(anyone know?), but there are always legacy browsers to consider.
3. I have found Flash Remoting and AMF to be more robust than the web
service implementations I have used. I have forced myself to use web
services in newer projects rather than Flash Remoting just to get the
experience, and I have found bugs in both the Flash implementation and
in Apache Axis which caused a lot of frustration and would have been
avoided if I had used Flash Remoting. So far, I have not run into any
significant bugs with Flash Remoting that I can recall.
The bottom line is, as always, there is no single answer that is right
for everyone. I think it's a decision that has to be made on a project
by project basis. The only absolute I can offer is to encapsulate the
communication mechanism enough to allow you to change your mind later
on down the road.
Christian
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