Has Adobe just killed SWX?

Adobe today announced a new open source initiative called BlazeDS, which sees the previously proprietary AMF protocol file format made open source. Why is this a big deal? Well up until now, Flash-based RIA developers wanting to pass data between the client and a back-end server have had to choose between three unappealing technologies: XML/JSON, Adobe’s official remoting technologies and unofficial third party tools based on “hacking” Adobe file formats. The first suffers from serialization/ deserialization and verbose data format overheads. The second is just plain expensive (and only works with Java back-ends). The third is of dubious legality. BlazeDS changes all of that.

BlazeDS is based on the AMF file format used in Flash Remoting, and in the (until today) dubious legality of products like AMFPHP. With the release of BlazeDS and the transformation of AMF into an open file format, Adobe have made AMFPHP legal, which is superb news for RIA developers. Its worth thanking Microsoft here therefore. Why? Well ask yourself why, other than through a fear of Silverlight stealing the RIA market from Flash, would Adobe be given away a previously valuable asset?

And so back to the subject of this post. Has Adobe just killed SWX? Until today, SWX lacked (as far as I could tell) the ability to pass complex objects back and forth between server and client, but it more than made up for this by the server providing the data as native SWF files. However now that AMFPHP is fully legal and SWX remains in the legal grey zone, to me the choice between AMFPHP and SWX becomes a no-brainer. I can see no reason now to use SWX.

I invited Aral Balkan to respond to this post. He didn’t disappoint and provided a very detailed response on his blog.