Can FMS be used to communicate with a SQL server and serve xml data to a client?
Graeme Bull - Aug 27, 2006
The questions: Can FMS be used to communicate with a SQL server and serve xml data to a client?
Is it possible for it to serve graphic images such as jpeg or pngs? What methods would accomplish this?
The answer:
We'll start with the talking to databases from Flash Media Server 2 I think. Up until FMS2 you had to use remoting to talk to a database. Now this isn't too bad but it did require a technology that you weren't necessarily going to use anywhere else. Not too attractive to an application architecture manager. One more link in the chain of activities that the application needs to do.
One of the greatest additions in my mind that was added to FMS2 is the fact that you can now talk to any server side page (asp, php, cgi, cfm, jsp etc etc). Of course with that comes the ability to now read in XML from any server out there, it all works exactly the same as the Flash XML object and loadVars object.
There are tons of examples out on the internet on how to do this so I'll skip the example here, but needless to say that if you have used XML or LoadVars on the client side, you can now do that on the server side too.
For the second question of being able to serve up images like jpgs and gifs, no, unfortunately FMS doesn't have this ability. There was somebody who managed to send over the pixel by pixel information through Central (a now dead technology) but it was quite slow. Interestingly enough though was that it was possible. Perhaps Apollo will offer some abilities like that?