Remoting and AMF?

[Jarisha]

Hi there -

Do you have a comparison chart that shows how you rate against other competing products? Since I've been researching and evaluating them all, I could give you a list if you'd like? (3 others so far.) Also, could you help me with a question I have about SFS's performance?

In particular, I'm trying to determine if SmartFoxServer uses remoting and AMF? Or is communication strictly via XML? I see your raw binary format in the docs. Is that as efficient as AMF? Sorry if the answer's obvious. It would *seem* that your server-side objects would be shared (and therefore "remoted" with AMF?), but although I'm an experience AS programmer, I'm just coming up to speed on server issues. And I don't see anything about it in your docs? Thanks for your time.

[Lapo]

Hello and welcome

Do you have a comparison chart that shows how you rate against other competing products? Since I've been researching and evaluating them all, I could give you a list if you'd like? (3 others so far.)

No, we don't have such comparison chart. As far as I know there isn't a review or product shoot out about the different socket servers available...
Anyways you can quickly compare the main features of all these products and restrict the possible choices to those that seem more interesting to you.

About SmartFoxServer you can start from here >> http://www.smartfoxserver.com/products/ and then inspect the product pages.

In particular, I'm trying to determine if SmartFoxServer uses remoting and AMF? Or is communication strictly via XML? I see your raw binary format in the docs. Is that as efficient as AMF? Sorry if the answer's obvious.

We don't use AMF and remoting. Also we don't use a real "binary" format. In our documentation we talk about raw/string based protcol.

XMLSockets in Flash allow to send streams of characters terminated by a \x00 char. SmartFoxServer uses XML for system messages and allow users to choose XML or the raw protocol for their extensions.
We've found this solution very effective and the XML we use is already optimized. The raw protocol allows us to send very little data (say 5-10 chars) for fast updates in action games and real-time apps, while the XML protocol is great for sending complex data.
Also XML has another big advantage, it's easy to debug, which in turn helps developers to check the data being sent and received and fix problems more quickly.

It would *seem* that your server-side objects would be shared (and therefore "remoted" with AMF?), but although I'm an experience AS programmer, I'm just coming up to speed on server issues. And I don't see anything about it in your docs? Thanks for your time.

I am not sure if I understand your question...
There's a feature called "Server Variables" which allows to store values on the server side and share it across groups of users, for example all the users in a chat room. These values can also be updated by users and the server will notify the change to all the other clients interested in this variation.
This feature is helpful when your applications is mostly coded on the client side. If you use server side extensions you can create more complex interactions and ways of sharing data across users.

Let me know if you have any other questions...