[Resolved] [Resolved] [Resolved] [Resolved] [Resolved] [Resolved] MX with XML and SOAP?

[julianj]

I love flash and I've always wanted it to be a contender for real enterprise application development rather than just relatively small scale websites (please don't shout me down - I know it's possible, but I think there are easier ways!). The one thing that has made this unrealistic for me is performance and specifically the performance of the XML parser. Does anyone know if the XML support has been improved in Flash MX? My ideal scenario would be to be able to easily call web services from flash which would be hugely helped by having some sort of efficient SOAP support in actionscript.

Does anyone have any light to shed?

[swampy]

Optimized Application Server Integration
Use XML structured data to populate visually rich user interfaces to create sales forms, virtual shopping carts, customer surveys, and stock availability matrixes. Persistent XML connectivity allows real-time information to be displayed.

[julianj]

I'm not doubting that there will still be XML support I'm just wandering whether it will be significantly faster than it was in flash 5. Realtime conncetion is also possible with flash 5 using XMLSockets. Having said that it's not much use in a real world situation because you can't usually go though firewalls because of the port restrictions.

For people to really embrace this as an application development tool it has to compete against things like .NET. While flash 5 is good, it isn't as productive or as performant. I still love it, I'd just like to be able to seriously recommend that my company use it rather than just play with it in my own time.

[mugwump]

These are at least two different points: The one is the performance of the built-in parser and macromedia will hopefully have done something about it - the other is the availabilty of a well-structured framework for building real-world applications based on flash. I think one of the main problems with flash is a lack of standardized approaches to accessing databases, supporting workflow: In the end, everybody makes up its one way of distributing logic between client and servers. Maybe we should not forget, that falsh is a "View"-Component, so from an architectural point of view, one shouldn't place too much business-logic into the flash-front-end. Apart from Generator, which suggests at least an idea of supporting mor complex things, there is Fortress (http://www.xadra.com) - and http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmlrpcflash/.
What I've seen from the Macromedia-Announcements, there is a new version of ColdFusion comming, that has some kind of support for flash, but I'm not really sure, what exactly this means...

[mugwump]

Found a link: http://www.devx.com/webdev/reviews/F...ib030402-2.asp
It reads like there will be a new protocol built in flash6 that connects directly to a cold fusion server( as they call it: Flash Application Server Gateway)??! I more or less imagined something like flash-proxies to WebServices - anyone willing towrite that (and please, don'f found it onto some strange and proprietary things like a ColdFusion-Flash Application Server Gateway)...

[julianj]

I agree completely that flash is a client side tool and should not be concerning itself with things like data access directly. This is exactly why the critical thing (for me) is to be able to communicate effectively and easily (and quickly) with the back end components that are going to do that sort of thing in my architecture. The "modern" distributed application uses the internet to do this and increasingly via XML and web services which is why that's my chief area of interest/concern. For flash to stand a chance of reinventing itself as a serious client-application development environment I think it needs to be able to do these things better; my fingers are crossed for MX.