I am writing an application in Flash Builder 4.5. I am also writing a PHP Web service to access data from our MySQL database. This Web service will be made available to third party clients for them to develop applications to access our database as well, via SOAP.
Is there a big performance difference between connecting to the service in Flash Builder via connecting directly to the PHP file vs. connecting to a Web Service via SOAP?
I would kind of like to connect to this service the same way that our clients will, to make sure things stay as uncomplicated as possible for future development, but performance is my main priority.
Soap is a highly verbose message system, generally the actual data in the soap is 5-15% of the total size of the transmission, so it’s HUGE. You might want to look at WebORB or any other middle man than can digest your php services and auto translate into AMF, a binary, compressed, flash supported protocal that is tremendously smaller. It really depends on how many calls your actually making though.
See: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/blog/2007/03/flex-remoteobject-vs-webservice.html
AMFPHP is another such project designed to handle this scenario: http://projects.silexlabs.org/?/amfphp