So for a year now I’ve been wanting to mess around with multi-user connectivity in flash. I knew there were several products out there and I just hadn’t had time to mess around with any of them. Over the last couple weeks I actually have had some time to experiment and it’s been very enjoyable. The first step was to assess what types of things I needed. I was mostly interested in messaging and the sending of small images. The flash media server seemed to be mainly geared at video and audio streaming which I didn’t care about. Red 5 was pretty much an open source version of that. I found a cool little app called socketserver made by Richard Shields. It was a very nice simple to setup socket server that allowed communication between multiple flash apps. It’s mainly designed as a messaging system that basically blasts out any incoming message to everyone who is connected. If you’re looking for a simple chat server then it’s a great service, but I needed a bit more.
I then went through a few of the commercial options and ended up choosing smartfoxserver. It’s socket server for flash among other interfaces that allows messages and data to be transferred to clients. It supports zones/rooms a buddy system and several other chat community type features. One of the major advantages was that is has an OSX server, which makes developing much easier on my mac. Getting things up and running has been pretty smooth. If you are using the AS3 then you might find everything but the API docs to be kinda useless. So far there seems to be much more support for AS2, but once you figure out how everything works it’s no big deal.
So far I’ve found the server to be stable and easy to monitor. It comes with a handy flash admin interface with nice visuals, looks much better than most server admin interfaces. I have found some issues with sending large objects, mainly a byteArray representing a user pic, but I got around it using a method my friend used by converting the byte array to a base64 encoded string. I haven’t flushed out that whole issue yet, but I’m assuming there was some limit on the object size and that by encoding it I was able to get it under the ceiling.
So for right now smartfoxserver has served me well and I look forward to continuing to work with it.
