macromedia flash flash remoting: Can anyone point me to an application that allows local access to .NET classes
through AMF/Flash Remoting? I love MM Flash Remoting, but the EULA only allows
it to be used in a server-client scenario.

FlashORB's upcoming v1.5 looked promising, until I learned that to distribute
my application, I'd have to cough up FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS for an OEM
license. Questions to Midnight Coders about why their product will allow local
access when it can't be bundled with the application resulted in a vague "this
is an enabling technology for what we're planning to do next" (yeah, I don't
know what that means, either).

I'm hoping someone knows of a product aimed at developers, with a royalty-free
licensing model similar to Flash Studio Pro (i.e. you don't have to sell your
kidney for the fees required to use their product in developing a custom
application that's going to run on more than one computer), that would allow me
to invoke .NET classes from Flash, and pass structured data objects between a
Flash GUI and .NET. In the alternative, does anyone know where I can research
ways to pass AMF objects between flash and .NET (using my own assembly written
in C# or VB.NET, for example)?

Any and all help much appreciated!

I've been trying to crack this one for a while. In the past I've had MM's
ASP.NET remoting gateway up and running using Cassini ( a minimal .NET
server ) but I'm now thinking there could be a way to achieve the same king
of thing using PHP and AMFPHP which might overcome some of the licensing
issues.

In the same way Cassini is a .NET application to run ASP.NET pages, PHP now
ships with a command line interpreter (CLI) that can be used to run PHP
scripts outside the bounds of a web server.

I think that if I can write an HTTP server using PHP sockets and get it to
run PHP scripts, AMFPHP could be used to allow flash remoting to work on a
local computer with nothing more than PHP required!!

Of course you can add database support using SQLLite ( uses flat text files
for persistent data ) and the whole thing should ( in theory ) be portable
between computers, meaning that you could bundle it in an installer and use
the PHP HTTP server as the tier that connects your flash application to the
filesystem and OS.

Once again, there might be some licensing issues to overcome. I did
consider using FlashORB's .NET solution but the pricing is as steep as MM's.

At the end of the day, all I want is a good way of connecting flash to the
desktop without doing XML parsing ( sockets ) or text parsing (
projector-based ActiveX style communication ). Flash remoting is the
answer. Just got to figure out how to do it (for free!).

Stephen




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Yeah, I'd already checked into things like OpenAMF, but I don't know the first
thing about PHP and want to get away from the browser environment...After
paying close to $1000 for Flash Remoting and checking into FlashORB (I'd heard
it had a more developer-friendly licensing agreement than Flash Remoting...NOT
true!), I've been looking very hard for something that enables AMF exchange
between Flash and .NET on a local computer without web server (FlashORB 1.5 is
supposed to enable this, but no bundling DLL with local app allowed...). It
looks like I'll have to write some sort of wrapper that passes the data over
sockets, but don't know where I can get the specs on AMF format to do data type
conversions, etc. Any ideas?

If you're trying to load AMF data on a distributable media (CD-ROM, etc.), you
can try writing the data to a FLV file, and then loading that FLV file with
Flash Player 7. The data event(s) on the FLV file will invoke and transmit the
AMF data to your movie. I've created a component (first draft, works, but I
don't have any documentation) that can do this: takes data from your Flash
movie, saves it FLV, downloads the FLV so you can use with a Flash movie to
consume that same data.

-Robert

I'm interested in how this works Robert. Do you have an example ?


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