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Adobe Opens Up AMF Spec
neutrino38 writes "Adobe has released the specification of the AMF format, the format used by Flash Remoting — the equivalent of AJAX for the Flash world. The article doesn't mention the AMFPHP project and the fact that some German and Canadian guys had reverse-engineered the format a long time ago. Adobe's action eases a long-standing legal uncertainty that slowed the uptake of AMFPHP for commercial projects. Next, we note that Adobe has not released its RTMP protocol used to contact a Flash Media server. This latter protocol is more interesting as it provides sessionful operation; media streaming; RPC both client-side and server-side using the AMF format; and shared objects among several sessions and server-side events. Fortunately, RTMP has been partially reverse-engineered by the red5 project. I suggest that the W3C should take a look at the whole Flash ecosystem as they think about upgrading the HTTP protocol."
Will the opening of AMF help Gnash http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ ?
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
I suggest that the W3C should take a look at the whole Flash ecosystem as they think about upgrading the HTTP protocol.
This statement at the closure of the article is so stupid I don't even know on which angle to attack it first.
As a side note, can we PLEASE gt rid of this horrible trend of submitters adding their own "personal view" on postings? Frankly I don't give a crap. It's bad enough when the editors do it.
The summary is a jumble mess, but the fact that Flex/Flash is still mostly closed source, but fills an important gap that isn't addressed by currently implemented standards, is problematic.
Take a look at this google finance page You simply can't do the type of interactive charting that they do there without Flash and Flex. Any AJAX implementation of that would be just a hack.
It could be done with AJAX techniques and SVG, which is the open standard for flash like animations, but neither major browser implements the full spec yet.
So, the larger point about needing an open standard that is actually implemented is a valid one. But I don't think the fault lies in the W3C, it is just that it is taking some time for volunteer programmers to implement the standards that they came out with in Firefox.
Exactly. Flash is more ubiquitous than anything on the web. More ubiquitous than internet explorer. It runs binaries in the host machine, not simply running the in the browser's sandbox. I don't know if it will load and run native binaries over the web (like active X) or if it has it's own sandboxed java-like pseudo code. But it's a single sourced point of failure rather than a diverse ecosystem like all the different java VMs. Plus the code is enormous. Who knows what's in there. (cringley has speculated ADOBE could leverage this ubiquity to role out all sorts of products deployable overnight just by activating them. e.g. imagine is tommorrow everyone with flash also had bit torrent, google desktop, and perhaps even some DRM system available. "flash" deployment of programs could make them instant industry standards. no more arguing over which DRM will be universal is everyone has it available.)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Um...Small question: Why do you use flashbock?
Just do what I do. Dont install flash. Simple.
FlashBlock like NoScript will allow you to have FLASH installed and select which media you want to allow
There has been a browser war going on for a while. It isn't the IE vs. Firefox war everyone talks about. It's about the rendering engine to use.
Apple's WebKit has succeeded beyond Apple's wildest dreams. It is officially being used at Google for its applications, it has been adopted by KDE, and the Gnome team is also about to adopt it. It is also the official rendering engine for Android. That puts WebKit on each Linux distribution and on what will soon become a major portable Internet device platform.
Adobe has been pushing Flash as the web rendering engine to rule the world, but it hasn't been doing so well. The big war for the browser isn't the desktop, but all the little devices that we will all carry around: PDAs, Phones, cameras, music players, game machines, etc. Flash needs a consumer client in order to work, and the fact that all of these devices will depend upon Adobe creating a client for each and every platform and operating system just doesn't cut it. Manufacturers don't want Adobe to rule whether their device is worthy of a Flash client.
In order for Adobe to be truly competitive in this fight, they must open up the Flash file specifications. That way, each device maker can design their own Flash player much the same way they build their own web browser according to HTTP/HTML specs.
The only question I have is how "open" is the spec? What happens if Adobe wants a new version of Flash with more features? Will it open up the new specs? Will Adobe allow me to create a program that will write to the Flash file format, or is that still closed to me? This isn't entirely unheard of. Microsoft has "open specs" for NTFS. I can give my operating system the ability to read NTFS, but not the ability to write it without first getting a license from Microsoft.
The announcement of the opening of the AMF protocol (which is a compressed, binary stream of data, used to transfer data from a back-end server to a flash application, no different than AJAX), is actually a subset of Adobe's announcement to open-source the BazeDS project. BazeDS is a Java server that sits as middleware between your Flash/Flex app and your back-end server (Java, PHP, ColdFusion, etc). AMF is a major part of that product. To all the critics of the Flash player... Take a look at its track record. It is under a meg download, available for most platforms (Win,Mac,Linux,Symbion,etc), and has an excellent security track record (as compared browsers/plugins in the industry). It does not just take a "binary stream" and execute it -- it has a very strict sandbox enviroment that protects both the browser, and the operating system. Heck, you can't even load a Web Service without the called-domain allowing it. And while not opening up the full SWF format, Adobe has open-sourced the Flex Framework, which is used to create SWF files. Take a look at Adobe Labs : http://labs.adobe.com/ for more info on some of Adobe's open-source projects.
Frankly, I can't believe this. Slashdot, which gave Sun so much crap for making Java source code available under a wrong kind of license, is front page-advocating wider adoption of software, for which no source code is available at all ...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Mod be down, but I kind of agree with the OPs point that the W3C should take a better look at Flash. Not to update the HTTP protocol of course - neither Flash nor the W3C have interest in changing that. But things like access to the bitmap data of images or a flexible component model are very useful for us programmers. Without advancements, we will forever be stuck with half baked web apps, and the W3C better look at what flash does right.
Next, we note that Adobe has not released its RTMP protocol
Adobe recently announced to make it's messaging server open source. This includes the RTMP, of course.
The GP's point was that its all rubbish.
Seriously, there are uses for Flash apart from ads. Many websites use it for embedded audio, video, instant messaging, simple image editing, games, and basically any interactive functionality which would be too slow and hackish to implement using AJAX.