Difference between RemotingServices, WebServices and HTTP in Flex.

Question

Dear friends, We use 3 types of services in Flex; HTTP, Remoting and WebServices and would like to increase my understanding about their use cases. As far as I understand,

1. Remoting can be used only in homogeneous environment like Flex-RubyOnRails (through RubyAMF) while Webservices can be used in Heterogenous environment using SOAP protocol.

2. Remoting has advantage of native object support that web services don't have. That also means no parsing/extraction will be required in former.

3. Now, talking of HTTP services, they dont support complex operations or parameter passing and can be used for only basic operations.

Friends please correct me if I am wrong anywhere and also please share more on this.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I'll give it a shot.

1. Remoting can be used only in homogeneous environment like Flex-RubyOnRails (through RubyAMF) while Webservices can be used in Heterogenous environment using SOAP protocol.

I'm not sure what you mean by homogeneous or heterogenous here. Yes, RemoteObject needs to call remote servers through a Flex Remoting gateway. Just like the WebService tag needs to do so by using a SOAP WSDL.

RemoteObject also supports AMF which is a binary format that gives smaller transport sizes than SOAP, or XML. Automatic conversion between a backend object and an ActionScript class is a nice touch.

2. Remoting has advantage of native object support that web services don't have. That also means no parsing/extraction will be required in former.

Techincally I believe that parsing is still done; it is just built into the Remoting Gateway; and due to the binary format is more effecient.

3. Now, talking of HTTP services, they dont support complex operations or parameter passing and can be used for only basic operations.

Anything you can put in a URL you can pass to an HTTPService. Passing Complex objects would be notably difficult.