Interesting suggestions guys. I really appreciate them and will look further into them as I was unaware that there were web-based API's for retrieving database data.
I feel a little foolish because this is my first big project and I didn't fully understand the various RPC options. I set up Flex webservices using PHP, and in that process, Flex requires that you install Zend. This made me assume that I was using AMF, but I don't think that it does because my results were returned as XML. I now believe that to take advantage of AMF, I need to utilize RemoteObject instead of webservices to get info from my database. My Two BIGGEST concerns with the database are speed and cost. Speed for user experience - right now they are watching a spinner for 12 seconds while the database provides the data and it gets parsed. I am sending large amounts of data with each query to my app, so this is going to drive my bandwidth costs close to $15k/month. AMF delivers data in a binary format, so it is delivered in much smaller packet sizes, and MUCH faster. If you are on a PC, James Ward created a Flash App to demo the different speeds and file sizes and they are significant. So my first thought is to try using RemoteObject to get the results in AMF binary, both much faster and smaller file sizes than XML. My question to you now is, can these web-based API's deliver text as quickly and in as small of file sizes as AMF??? -- Sent from: http://apache-flex-users.2333346.n4.nabble.com/
