AMF client for Silverlight 2

One of deciding features of which RIA technology will be used by clients is definitely AMF. This is truer when the application is going to be running behind the firewall and “player factor” is not so important. The Action Message Format was added to Flash Player 6 and at the beginning was used as the primary method for exchanging data between Flash and ColdFusion. On December 2007 Adobe Published the AMF protocol specification and allowed developers to implement their own AMF gateways. Currently there is a large number of platforms with AMF support. Just to name a few:

• OpenAMF for Java


• PyAMF for Python


• RubyAMF for Ruby


• ZendAMF for PHP


• FluorineFx for .NET

Fluorine.NET authors introduced a project called FluroineFxSL – nothing else but an AMF client for Silverlight 2. At the moment the project is not available for download. However it can be checked out from their SVN.

Having an AMF client in Silverlight is a significant step for this RIA technology. Clients who have their existing PHP/Ruby/Java/’you name it’ back ends, capable of running AMF can now really consider Silverlight, if AMF is the only thing stopping them from using Microsoft technology. What is even more interesting is the FluorineFxSL support for NetConnection (RTMPT protocol). It makes exchanging data between Silverlight and Flex/Flash clients using Flash Media Server or Red5 really easy.

The FluorineFxSL source code is hosted at Google Code. It allows anonymous checkouts and is available here: http://fluorinefx.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/.

More information can be found at FluorineFx weblog.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 14 Oct 2008