flash - django communication -- amf, xml, or json?

Question

We are considering to develop a Flash front-end to a web application written using Django. The Flash front-end will send a simple "id" to the server and in response receive a couple of objects. The application will be open only to authenticated users.

To the extend of my current knowledge (which is basic for Flash) we can either use AMF or take an XML or JSON approach. AMF seems to have an upperhand as there are examples out on the internet showing it can cooperate easily with Django's authentication mechanism (most examples feature pyAMF). On the other hand, implementing a XML/JSON based solution may be easier and hassle free.

Guidance will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi,

first of all, you should design your app in such a way this doesn't matter. the transport layer should be completely encapsulated, leaving the encoding format transparent to the rest of the app.

personally I prefer JSON to AMF because it's human readable (which makes debugging easier) and there are implementations for every platform/language (so you can reuse the server part with JavaScript for example). And I prefer JSON to XML because it's more compact and semantically less unambiguous as well as closer to common object models. Also it can transport numerical and boolean data in a typesafe manner.

greetz

back2dos

Answer 2

JSON will probaby have the least complications and there's a great google code project that has JSON encoders and decoders here: http://code.google.com/p/as3corelib/

Answer 3

We've used pyAMF + Django on many projects here, and it's a breeze to setup and get running. If you need speed, AMF3 is probably your best bet. It's the smallest/fastest way to transfer data, and serialization is taken care of for you.

On the flip side, setting up json with Django isn't much work either, and it would give you the ability to hook other, non-AMF systems into it without any extra work. You just sacrifice a little speed for that benefit.

If you think you'll ever need other systems working with the backend, or if you think you might switch to an HTML-only, or offer some kind of non-Flash version of your app, I'd go JSON, otherwise, I'd use AMF.