Web Services in Flash 9 - AS3

While the push from AS2 to AS3 was completely brilliant and Flex2 and Flex3 are absolute heaven for an OOP programmer, Flash CS3 in AS3 is turning out to be a major dissapointment. All the enhancements and improvements in Flex are met by equal and opposite cuts in Flash functionality.

WebServices: Gone
Remoting: Gone
Binding: Gone (well... Binding was introduced in CS3... but only in AS2)

The upside though is that the developer community is strong enough to compensate these blemmishes on the otherwise beutiful face of Flash.

While looking for a WebService package, I stumbled upon Carlo Alducente's brilliant WSDL parser and service wrapper (http://labs.alducente.com/?p=7). The only problem is the error handling... and in order to handle errors nicely, what you really want is an AsyncToken... and a Fault class... and a FaultEvent... And a ResultEvent...etc.

So I rewrote the service package. Although it is packaged as se.manmachine.rpc, all the WSDL parsing and WebService method registering is the work of Carlo. I still haven't recieved his permisson to use his code in this way. Hopefully I will. Kudos Carlo!

The future plans is to extend the package to incorporate RemotingService (RS and WS both extending AbstractService), and using the Proxy class for registering dynamic methods... And then of course adding events for Invoking and headers, wrapping the headers... well... pretty much implementing the whole mx.rpc package for Flash. The future, however, lies in the future.

Download