I'm working on a system that transfers data from a back-end to Flex for display and manipulation. In this case, I can control the message format on the server-side. I'm pretty happy sending XML because of how easy it is to work with XML in Flex. On the other hand, XML is sometimes ridiculously inefficient as a message format as it tends to be pretty bloated. I'm imagining a few strategies:
* Strip and reduce the XML to use stupidly short element names and no spare white-space to reduce the message size a bit. This is a weak option in a lot of ways but it's easy to do. * Compress the XML and decompress it in Flex. This is an appealing option as I get to work with the XML but don't have such big messages. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get this to work using zlib and ByteArray.uncompress(). I'll also assume that there is some kind of sweet-spot when the cost of compression/decompression outweighs the cost of the larger message. Once I get this working, I could try to figure out when compression is worth engaging and then have the server compress when it (guesses) it will make sense. * Use AMF. Can't. It's not supported on the server and a project constraint is "thou shalt not implement binary protocols by hand." * Use a custom binary format, package the data that way on the server, and then write a custom parser in Flex. Can't. See previous point and another project constraint, "thou shalt not invent new binary formats." * Use another binary format that Flex does understand. Are there any? Basically, I'm looking for an efficient message transfer format that I don't have to invent or hand-code. Any suggestions and help appreciated!
