Question

I have two software to create with AIR: a server and a client. Both with AS3 and AIR.

I want to avoid having a big architecture with Remote Shared Object, or using BlazeDS, or having to set a Java / Python / … server in the middle.

In order to avoid having to parse socket data in the server and in the client side, I thought about using XMLSocket on the client side: the data arrives in a way which is already parsed by the Flash framework.

However, when I use this XMLSocket with the AIR ServerSocket, the “connect” event returns me a raw Socket on the server side. So I have to manually manage the XML data on the server side.

Is there a way to also use an XMLSocket on the server side to communicate with the client? A kind of trick to convert the returned Socket into an XMLSocket?

If there is an AS3 library which manages that, I did not find it.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I totally agree with Adrian in that server side code in ActionScript is going to be bad, Java being syntactically not that far would be much much better: hotspot JIT, multithreaded, with lots of highly optimized server side components.

Now having said that: XML Socket presents you with a parsed XML, still what is going to be transmitted over the wire will be just XML as text. So performance-wise it is just the same as using a regular socket and parsing yourself. And this can be as easy as:

var text: Object = <data received>
var xml: XML = new XML(text);

So once you’ve received a full xml payload you’re ready to go.

And if you think XMLSocket can take care of getting a full XML before parsing, I did some XML Socket stuff and got XML delivered in two or more fragments and had to cope with it myself, her an example:

...
private var xmlData: String = "";
private var errorCount: int;
...

private function dataHandler(e: DataEvent): void {  
  if (errorCount > 2) {
    errorCount = 0;
    xmlData = "";
  }     
  try {             
    xmlData += e.data;
    processMessage(XML(xmlData));
    // valid XML, clear the buffer
    xmlData = "";
  } catch (error: Error) {
    // otherwise log error and wait for the rest of the XML 
    log.error(error.toString());
    log.error(e.data);
    errorCount++
  }
}