I’ve recently been working on a new Flash project. As always I’m using AMFPHP and Flash NetConnection to access the database and some backend services. Flash remoting, for me and many others, has always been a very robust solution to dealing with external data retrieval in Flash. From the moment I read about it, I became a dedicated fan. After implementing all my data-driven media-based sites with it, I have no complaints. It rocks! The newest version AMFPHP 1.9 beta, is faster and better, from an OOP perspective. You now have strict data typing between flash and the backend, and the backend can be set up to handle non-flash instances sent from flash…. basically, you can instantiate an Object directly from Flash! amazing!
I did come across something that fooled me though. I was setting a Session variable in PHP and trying to access it when dealing with button clicks. I wanted to verify the session for Logged In / Logged Out checking. I have used sessions in remoting solutions before and they worked fine. But, this time, I was stumped. I seeked help from my friends at the Flash-DB. Jorge Solis, the main man over there pointed me in the direction of an HTTP Proxy based debugger called Charlie. I was told it was the answer. Sure enough, once I got Charlie up and running, I could see the data being send via wire between Flash and PHP. My session was indeed working! I was trilled.
The moral of this post is, when you are using the Flash IDE, and your remoting service is not responding as it should be, give your app a test run on a server. It might work. For a small license fee, Charlie is worth the investment. It grabs some really nice data and gives you a very nice heads up for Backend debugging when working with Flash Remoting.