We have a large, high-usage chat app built with FMS and we spent quite a bit of time investigating FDS as an alternative. My conclusion is that FDS just isn't the right tool for the job. It's adequate for small, simple chat features that you may want to add to some other app (like the dashboard example that ships with FDS), but not large scale chat apps like what we have running on MySpace.
Our FMS app relies on being able to dynamically create remote SharedObjects as needed and for clients to dynamically become aware of and subscribe to them (like for user-created rooms). While I was able to figure out how to dynamically create destinations in FDS without using the XML config files, it's not a documented part of the API and I had to do something pretty ugly to provide the destination config xml to the client at runtime. Normally, the destination config information is inserted into the client at compile time, which is a major limitation. You can get around this, but it's kludgy, undocumented, and it may break with subsequent releases of FDS.
We also need to be able to manage connections on the server side and keep track of connected clients in a convenient way (like looping through the Application.clients array in FMS). That's really painful in FDS.
And push is *much* easier in FMS.
We were excited about the idea of moving our server-side logic out of the single-threaded jscript runtime of FMS, but I just kept running into roadblock after roadblock with FDS. I hope that someday FMS or a derivative of it sits on top of FDS to hide some of the complexities of FDS while allowing us to get down into the lower-level workings if we want to.
I think FDS is a great solution for a lot of different problems, but it's just not the right tool for the job in our case.
HTH,
Tom
Userplane Technologies, an AOL company
Hi all,
I have asked this before... it's just to see if things have changed in a while.
It turns out that I have a frozen Flex 2 project that requieres a Chat
server ( video chat actually ) and uses FDS a lot.
I would really like to use FDS for the chat logic as well ( which is
actually much more complicated than a simple chat... it has queues,
presence states are used in business logic, etc ). But I am missing
the chat-oriented design of a product like FMS2.
Note that I DO have FMS but I would end up building a really complex
system ( divided in two parts, which have to talk all the time... ).
Alternatives:
* FDS + FMS talking through web services ( the java bridge is not
officially released )
** horrible solution since the complexity of the system goes through the roof
** Even if the java bridge existed ( I would rather have the FMS model
replicated in a java environment, much better ).
* FDS with a custom made chat server on top of messaging.
** Nice, but I have to build this functionality and it is not trivial
( has anyone done this already? )
* Red5??
** I need to travel in time... and to clear the FUD for my client.
* Flex2.x??
** time travel again...
Any comments on this situation??
Thanks,
Aldo
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- Re: [flexcoders] Building a chat server over FDS... impossible... Tom Bray
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