can I retrofit FluorineFX or WebORB to my C# web service?

Question

I have a C# web service which currently communicates with a Flex app using XML. It's not streaming data or anything, but still I'd like to lower the overhead involved. I have two questions:

1) would I see any benefit from using a technology like FluorineFX or WebORB in terms of reducing load on the server? The Flex clients won't perceive much difference, I imagine.

2) how easy is it to retrofit a technology like this into an existing product? Is it easier when you start from scratch?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

1. As far as server load, it's very tough to say. I can say definitely that the performance difference in the client are significant. For large data sets, we've seen a 10x performance increase in the client by using AMF instead of XML. The Flash Player can deserialize the AMF much faster than XML and this is important since you don't know how much horsepower the client machine will have.

2. Pretty easy. The programming model for Fluorine isn't one where you code against their explicit API; you just configure Fluorine to expose certain .NET services. Essentially any plain old class can have its methods exposed remotely. so your migration from web services to Fluorine FX should be easy.

Answer 2

It's very easy to expose your existing services to a Flex client using WebORB. What you would do is simply drop your services into WebORB's bin folder making them viewable through WebORB's service browser. You can then select and invoke the methods for testing purposes and then auto generate the integration code for deployment into your FlashBuilder project. This creates the integration between your client application and services on the server-side.

In terms of performance, there is a considerable performance improvement using remoting as opposed to web services. We have a free benchmark tool that lets you test the difference yourself in your own environment. Performance gains are more noticeable for larger data sets. Here is a link to that benchmark tool:

http://www.themidnightcoders.com/products/weborb-for-net/developer-den/technical-articles/amf-vs-webservices.html