flash data integration: Hi people,

Given that a flash client has been loaded, is there a way to do async.
communcations between the flash and the server?

I'm kind of new to flash communication server/remoting, but I've done some
good flash AS scripting on previous versions of flash (everything up to sockets
+ XML, but not J2EE related). I'm trying to find an easier way for me to start
something, so what I think are possible are the following, please correct me
(or give some suggestions), thanks!

1) Sockets - the primitive way, just normal flash and any web server, good
thing is it's primitive and low-level, you can do anything you want, but bad
thing is, you need to build everything bottom up.

2) More primitive, HTTP Requests (REST), just post variables and get XML back
problem: it needs to be a flash initiated communication, not async. And
if there are sessions involved, things get complicated.

3) Flash com. server - the macromedia way
- i think there are many possibilities here:

a) all flash com server
- problem: everything is flash based, relies heavily on flash com
server, most of the code lies on the flash client (don't want to use this
because it's not too portable and have a steeper learning curve, again please
correct me)

b) flash remoting + J2EE (i don't know .Net, so Java is my choice)
- using XML to exchange Objects with Java, good that there are
tools done for this, e.g. converting between AS objects & Java Hashes (am I
right?)
- Question: - so if we're using a session here, we need javabeans
or EJB's right?
- can I just use Tomcat + Javabeans and not
J2EE server?
- can the server (Tomcat or J2EE AppSvr)
initiate a connection to the flash client (given that it knows where the client
is) ? Is it like using sockets where the server can easily transfer messages
to the client or does the client need to pull for server updates?


So after all this, I'm kind of leaning towards 1) or 3b). Am i heading the
right direction?

Also, since I'm a PHP/MySQL programmer as well, are there any ways I can use
PHP to do some kind of active connections with session?

Thanks!! :o

flash is a client platform. so, dont expect it to behave like server, or
listener. it only can initiate connections. but cannot accept connections.

http://orison.biz/products/chatmx_web.aspx
read the article i written with this app. may be it'll be helpful to you.


// chall3ng3r //