So I was at the bar with co workers friday and flash remoting came up in the discussion. One of the flash developers noted that we never really used flash remoting in our projects and he reasoned because we’re not doing heavy data transfers the need wasn’t there. He went on to say he used it on a project of his and he didn’t see the gain but he thought it was cool and something good to know but he’s not sure why.

I disagree with his point of view in many regards. For one I try to only learn stuff that I perceive will add value to what I do and what I achieve. With the mountain of things I want to do in life there isn’t time to “waste” on something I can’t get value from (that said I do play my fair share of video games, but finger dexterity is important for programmers). I’ve not done so much Flex/Flash stuff in the last year but as one of the leads in our PHP practice I still champion remoting and here is why

1) I liked the idea of remoting not because of the speed gains over xml rpc but because you can pass typed objects between server and application. The idea of passing a User object and being able to use that object in flash without any manual serializing by the developer gave me goose bumps. I’ve not worked with other developers who have cherised that possibility as much as I have but I think that’s really one of the understated benefits of remoting over using xml

2) It’s faster/more efficent that xml when it comes to large datasets

3)I used it once simply because it was binary and slightly harder to hack (yes it’s not a strong point but it worked out. The system was never “breached” and all was well).

It’s a short list but no. 1 is the real reason for this post. Not having to loop through the dataset to convert into my app defined objects is great. Being a PHP dev coming from a flash background I appreciate this more than most I’m coming to realize