First, I just want to make the official http://www.flashzengarden.com/blog/?p=2. I'm in a bit of a chicken-egg problem here, because a main function of each entry will be to display info about the other entries. For now I have some dummy titles and fake descriptions up there, so you might have to use your imagination a bit.
Okay, now for Remoting vs. XML.
In my http://www.actionscript.com/flashweek/00000657.html introducing the idea of the Flash Zen Garden, many of the comments said something like "Make it be an XML feed! Don't use Remoting!" That didn't really make sense to me, so I pinged a few experts. They all confirmed my suspicion that XML is more widely understood and accepted, but that they use Remoting whenever possible because of its advantages. Here is a diagram showing what is currently happening with the Flash Zen Garden setup:
The arrays and objects of information come into Flash ready to be used, no translation or parsing required. Alternately, with just a few div tags and some CSS, I'm able to pull the same data objects and display them in the browser as XHTML. Now let's look at what it would take to add XML support to Flash:
Notice the extra steps? Not to mention that the data transferred via Remoting is in binary format, making it much smaller (unless you use http://www.actionscript.com/flashweek/00000652.html). So why wouldn't you use Remoting? I'm going to guess at three possible reasons, answer them quickly, and then turn it over to you for comments:
- Remoting requires all this backend set-up stuff. I'm a Flash developer, not a server geek. Fair enough. Remoting can be a pain to initially set up. However, it's already been done for you in this case. Cross that one off.
- Remoting costs money, not only for the Remoting software, but for the server-side languages it's supported on (ColdFusion, .NET, etc). True, which is why we're using http://www.amfphp.org/. There's also http://www.openamf.org/ for the Java fans out there, or you can even use http://simonf.com/amfpython/ Of course, even if we were using ColdFusion, that part of it would still be provided for you in the case of Flash Zen Garden .
- I'm just used to XML, and have never bothered learning Remoting. This is the one answer I sympathize with the most. I spend a lot of time working with Flash, but I'm just now getting used to AS 2.0, have never even looked into FlashComm server, and have been waiting for months to try out the educational license I received for http://moock.org/unity/. It's easy to just stick with what you know. Well, by now you can probably guess what my answer is going to be: yup, solved that as well. Rather than exposing the remoting calls directly, I've created another layer that handles the calls and results. It's a pretty simple system of creating your own object, adding it as a listener to the main "FZGcore" object, and specifying the callbacks.
The sample FLA has a few comments. If you know how to use basic arrays, objects, methods and properties, you should be able to create a Flash Zen Garden interface without ever learning a thing about Remoting. Now, if you still want the XML option, tell us why. I'm sure there are other reasons I've missed. I'm especially interested to hear from those that have used both Flash Remoting and XML extensively, as I will admit that I've rarely used XML with Flash.