I think anything that clarifies why one would pick one option as opposed to another in Flex in useful. In particular comms; I struggled with this on my initial bouts with Flex, wondering if I had picked the right option for what I was trying to achieve.

As always, "sucks to livedocs"!

Usually existing backends/developer skills determine which method to go with. However, if you're a sole-dev, working on a simple solution by yourself, I'd stick to using HTTPService and textual-based request/response, as it's the easiest to work with AND provides the most flexibility.

With WebService, you'll have to navigate the complex SOAP-based world and have to have your requests/responses form to predefined schemas, and your backend tools will need to output correct responses based on those schemas (not necessarily as easy as it should be). And WebService implementations by different back-end tools and providers aren't nearly as interoperable as they'd like you to believe.

With RemoteObject, you'll need a serverside service that supports AMF. Which, luckily, has been open-sourced and has an implementation in just about every server-side technology you can think of. Things are a bit trickier to debug this on the wire, however, since it's binary data. However, like Andrew mentioned, in a lot of cases the data is compact and transfers faster, and Flex even unmarshells it quickly in the Flash Player due to using some low-level, platform-optimized code.

Now, my favorite: HttpService. Transfers data back and forth across the wire in plain text. Easy to debug. No tight data contract (could be a negative, though, depending on complexity of system). You can encode data in XML, JSON, cusotm-text or whatever textual style you want -- using JSON might be necessary if you already have existing server-side code.

When I can, I start with HttpService, and then move to the others as needed. For example, in some enterprise solutions, I've been required to use WebService and ...but even that's starting to lessen these days.

Hi there,
In my application, I have TileList with a image and label in each
tile. The image and label is retrieved from a xml file.However, when I run the project it fails and points to default FaultHandler function.

On further debugging, I realized that length of XML data returned from HTTPService is 0. So the httpservice is unable to hit the xml file..right ?

here is the code:

import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;
import mx.collections.XMLListCollection;
import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
[Bindable]
private var itemlist :XMLList;
private var itemlistcoll : XMLListCollection
private function xmlLoaded(evt:ResultEvent):void {
itemlist = evt.result.catalog;
trace( itemlist.length());

}
]]>

Can you please throw some light on what must have gone wrong.

Also, if the dataprovider for TileList is srv.LastResult.catalog, it seems to load the label but not image ( image is replaced by a small cross ).

Thanks,
Kshama

In response to my own message, the problem was due me putting the parameters
in the wrong order :P The correct order should be;

Key
Value
TTL
Application name

For a standard 'put', for a 'put_removable' it should be;

Key
Value
Secret algorithm
Secret hash
TTL
Application name

This all became clear when I took the time to learn the basics of Python and
understand what those scripts were doing.

I can now successfully 'put' (and 'put_removable') and 'get' with no
problems!! However :( I get an error when trying to do an 'rm'. I'm fairly
confident I'm calling the method right this time as I've essentially used
the format of the Python script available. The error I'm getting is this;

Avoiding obscuring previous error by supressing error encountered while
ending request: org.apache.xmlrpc.XmlRpcClientException: Exception closing
URLConnection

Thanks.

Rodolph Stuart
Lampadas