Derek shows how to push AMF encoded messages from the server with Rails through BlazeDS.

Ted introduces the Yahoo! map components for AS3.

Combine the two and you could build a Flex/Rails app that tracks someone’s position in real time.

The comparison is coming from one of the horses mouths so take it with a grain a salt. That said I think Adobe tried not to step on some Ajax toes and didn’t make a strong enough case for Flex.

It’s a good basic overview but there are a couple of things I disagree with;

Why use ColdFusion for all the examples? A shrinking minority still use it but all the ColdFusion guys I know switched to either PHP or Rails over the last two years. I think it’s best to use PHP for comparisons like this as everyone has used it and can easily translate PHP to their favorite language.

Even though Adobe won’t admit it the reason they’re doing the comparison is to show off that Flex does Ajax like things. At the end of the article they break down the pros and cons of each, and if I were an Ajax developer I’m not sure I would be convinced to try Flex. Their pros for Flex are that it’s easier to develop with because of an IDE, which is true but there are Ajax IDEs now (which the author mentions later), the other is performance which ends up a tie because Ajax in a browser can handle large amounts of text better.

If I were writing it my pro Flex arguments would have included;

Consistent results No matter your browser Flash is Flash so Flex is Flex. Except for extremely rare circumstances your app is going to behave as expected.

Class Mapping Flash Remoting can map server side classes. Objects don’t need to be converted into XML first to go over the wire and they arrive as native objects ready to use (no need to parse and convert them back again).

Not only Remoting If you do want to consume XML Flex can do that too, or JSON, or REST services etc. If you already have some kind of service set up Flex could slide in and replace Ajax so you could make use of it’s…

Advanced Multimedia Features Video, Audio, and Vector Animation are things you just cant do with JavaScript, it’s the way content on the Intertubes are moving and a big reason to use Flex.

My pro Ajax arguments would include;

Frameworks The sheer number of Ajax frameworks dwarfs anything Flex has right now.

User Base The Flex community is growing but the JavaScript community is huge, you’re much more likely to find help getting started or solving a problem with Ajax.

HotGigs has a feature where they collect and aggregate the hourly bill rates of the consultants on their site. Here are the average hourly bill rates for Flex, Flash, and Ruby, surprisingly they have sub-categories for Flash all the way down to Flash Remoting but there’s just one category for Ruby with no Rails sub-category.

For the Rails rate I’d guess that Rails is to Ruby as Flex is to ActionScript. I threw PHP in there as well to mix it up.

ActionScript hourly bill rates
ActionScript bill rate (low): $50.00
ActionScript bill rate (high): $75.00
ActionScript pay rate (low): $32.50
ActionScript pay rate (high): $48.75
Average hourly bill rate: $62.50

Adobe Flex hourly bill rates
Adobe Flex bill rate (low): $75.00
Adobe Flex bill rate (high): $125.00
Adobe Flex pay rate (low): $48.75
Adobe Flex pay rate (high): $81.25
Average hourly bill rate: $100.00

Flash hourly bill rates
Flash bill rate (low): $50.00
Flash bill rate (high): $75.00
Flash pay rate (low): $32.50
Flash pay rate (high): $48.75
Average hourly bill rate: $62.50

Flash Design (no full data but this was the average)
Average hourly bill rate: $50

Flash Remoting hourly bill rates
Flash Remoting bill rate (low): $60.00
Flash Remoting bill rate (high): $80.00
Flash Remoting pay rate (low): $39.00
Flash Remoting pay rate (high): $52.00
Average hourly bill rate: $70.00

Ruby hourly bill rates
Ruby bill rate (low): $75.00
Ruby bill rate (high): $95.00
Ruby pay rate (low): $48.75
Ruby pay rate (high): $61.75
Average hourly bill rate: $85.00

PHP hourly bill rates
PHP bill rate (low): $70.00
PHP bill rate (high): $90.00
PHP pay rate (low): $45.50
PHP pay rate (high): $58.50
Average hourly bill rate: $80.00

Flex had an average hourly bill rate of $70 a couple of months ago so it’s on the move (what recession?), if you’re an ActionScript Developer still doing Flash work get on the Flex train and raise those rates!

The rates seem about right to me (actually remoting seems low), what do you think?

Aaron has a series of posts on developing a system for stress testing AMF.

The setup: AMF Stress Testing - Flex, Ruby, JMeter.
The screen cast: Stress Testing AMF Gateway Screen Capture
The results: 37 Million (requests in), 9 hours.

That’s pretty amazing.

The next morning, we had the Live Search team from M$ asking us how the hell we did that. Pretty friggin cool. Also note that JMeter bursts requests, it’s not constantly sending requests. So we probably could have done 90 million in 9 hours no problem. Crazy.

Another successful AMF project. Go AMF!

I’ve been using a lot of XML Services recently, not necessarily by choice, as it was all consulting work and it wasn’t really my place to dive in and say “you should be using AMF!”. Even then if my clients asked me “why AMF?” the answer would of been because it’s easier for me when I should be telling them how AMF can be easier, better, faster for them too (and their servers). Hopefully tests like this will help spread the adoption of AMF, they definitely help the cause more than me whining about parsing XML ;)

And because I don’t think he sleeps Aaron also released a new version of Super Simple Remoting.

SWX Ruby is a port of SWX (originaly PHP), which claims to be “Ruby’s fastest library for exchanging data with Flash” I haven’t tried it because it doesn’t yet support Flash player 9 but I wouldn’t doubt it’s the fastest as many other methods aren’t too speedy (Although RubyAMF is much quicker lately).

as3yaml, you guessed it, is an Actionscript 3 YAML 1.1 parser and emitter.

From Ted (on flex) and Ryan Stewart.

Most are guessing AMF will be open sourced, anything that makes AMF more popular will be good news.

There are some new RubyAMF screencasts up, Aaron Smith walks you through tutorials on…

Flex with stand-alone RubyAMF
Flex with the RubyAMF Rails plug-in
Flash and authentication
Flash and custom fault objects

RubyAMF is also now 1.2 with respond_to functionality, so you can use one controller action to return anything your heart desires RHTML, AMF, XML, JSON you name it.

def MyController < ActionController::Base
  def list
    respond_to do |format|
     format.amf { render :amf => User.find(:all) }
    end
  end
end

Of course AMF is teh bestest :)

RubyAMF now can be used as a Rails plugin or you can run it as a Mongrel process. There’s a nice screencast on Rails integration here.

The one-man RubyAMF show that is Aaron Smith also has a Super Simple Remoting class to get you up and running super simply.

Ruby has gone from no AMF support to two AMF options (RubyAMF, WebORB) in one year, sweet nutz!

The Midnight Coders have released A new version of WebORB for PHP. There’s a bunch of new features which equal, if not leap-frog, thos in AMFPHP. Their post runs through the top ten new features, but my favorites are #6 client/server class mapping

Client/server class mapping configuration. Since this is one of the most common tasks when integrating Flex clients with any kind of backend systems, we tried to make it as simple as possible to create client/server class mappings. The Class Mappings section of the ‘Server Configuration’ tab provides an easy-to-use interface to establish class mappings:

and… #7 Tons of examples! A good example is worth pages and pages of documentation, they don’t take too long to create, and they let users get on with getting on.

The majority of work I do is Flash/Flex and Rails so ActiveRecord, which is the M in the Rails MVC, is really the only part of Rails I use. I’ve always wished I could get ‘Rails Lite’ (In this case Camping doesn’t count) and just use ActiveRecord to pass data back and forth. My wish has come true as I found out about RubyAMF (via FlexOnRails). RubyAMF and a database are all you need to use Flash Remoting with Ruby as RubyAMF has it’s own servlet or can integrate with Apache or Lighttpd.

But what if you don’t use Ruby? ActiveRecord is a pattern and not language specific. I’ve been doing some research on a PHP ActiveRecord solution for Flash Remoting because of the speed increases that are possible with AMFPHP 2.0. PHP Doctrine was the closest PHP ActiveRecord implementation I could find to the one in Rails. However, the future of AMFPHP is now up in the air as Patrick Minnault is retiring as a programmer to become a Neuro Scientist! I always knew he was too smart to be a programmer, actually he still supports the NDP in Canada so he can’t be that bright :P

I’m sure WebORB for PHP could be used with PHP Doctrine, maybe if I wish hard enough someone will figure it out for me.