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I’ve had very little experience with Flash Lite to date, but right now I’m working on a project which requires a mobile element to it. Not satisfied with doing the sensible thing and playing it safe I thought it would be great to offer some real-time features on a mobile, either via AFCS or FMS.
So I set out to see what was possible, in particular I wanted to make sure that Remote SharedObjects (RSOs) and NetConnection methods were available in Flash Lite. Here’s what I found.
I remembered that NetConnection and NetStream work fine in later versions of Flash Lite – Doug proved it to me. I can’t remember when NetConnection was added, it didn’t exist from the start but I was quickly told that RSOs are not supported (something which I haven’t yet verified). Still I held out some hope that AFCS could be used in some way, but once again it seems that Flash Lite does not support RTMPS (which is what AFCS uses for security) and therefore that door was quickly closing too.
Even though there was talk on the forums that NetConnection.call was also unsupported I wanted to see it with my own eyes. I built some simple test cases and used the device emulator in Flash CS4 to run the applications. At first it seemed that nc.call was truly unsupported. Fortunately though I quickly noticed that my AS2 skills were not totally up to speed anymore and I had some scoping issues in my code – and after fixing them I was able to successfully call a remote FMS function from Flash Lite 3.1 and receive a return value. What’s more, I also managed to successfully receive a client.call. This means that my plans are back on track, and I should be able to support data pushes over RTMP from FMS to Flash Lite 3.1 (and maybe earlier version – I haven’t tried).
I haven’t given up on RSOs either and will report back with my findings.
Did you build any real-time Flash Lite applications? I’d love to find out what others have achieved. Once my project is ready in a few months I will share more details.
