Adobe Opens Up AMF Spec 104
neutrino38 writes "Adobe has released the specification of the AMF format, the format used by Flash Remoting — the equivalent of AJAX for the Flash world. The article doesn't mention the AMFPHP project and the fact that some German and Canadian guys had reverse-engineered the format a long time ago. Adobe's action eases a long-standing legal uncertainty that slowed the uptake of AMFPHP for commercial projects. Next, we note that Adobe has not released its RTMP protocol used to contact a Flash Media server. This latter protocol is more interesting as it provides sessionful operation; media streaming; RPC both client-side and server-side using the AMF format; and shared objects among several sessions and server-side events. Fortunately, RTMP has been partially reverse-engineered by the red5 project. I suggest that the W3C should take a look at the whole Flash ecosystem as they think about upgrading the HTTP protocol."
Gnash!! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Nice summary... (Score:2)
Worst... (Score:1)
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I also thought it was pretty good. If you don't understand it, chances are it's probably not interesting to you, so just ignore it. You might also note that this is on developers.slashdot.org, so it's pretty much blindingly obvious who the target demographic is. Not every developer (nor even every web developer) is going to care about it, but a lot of the draw of sites like slashdot is that it allows you to keep abreast of news in areas related to your field of interest, but not quite close enough to your c
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Summary:
The article doesn't mention the AMFPHP project...
Article:
.... said Wade Arnold with AMFPHP. "Working with Adobe, we can create a common programming model that enables RIA developers to extend the reach of their applications across different server technologies in a compatible and consistent approach. The AMFPHP project is ecstatic to be able to work directly with Adobe in order to better leverage the AMF protocol in LAMP applications."
Designt HTTP around FLASH? WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suggest that the W3C should take a look at the whole Flash ecosystem as they think about upgrading the HTTP protocol.
This statement at the closure of the article is so stupid I don't even know on which angle to attack it first.
As a side note, can we PLEASE gt rid of this horrible trend of submitters adding their own "personal view" on postings? Frankly I don't give a crap. It's bad enough when the editors do it.
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So the editorial slant isn't so bad in context, it lets us dismiss the story without having an unwarranted lengthy debate about so
Open Standards (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at this google finance page [google.com] You simply can't do the type of interactive charting that they do there without Flash and Flex. Any AJAX implementation of that would be just a hack.
It could be done with AJAX techniques and SVG, which is the open standard for flash like animations, but neither major browser implements the full spec yet.
So, the larger point about needing an open standard that is actually implemented is a valid one. But I don't think the fault lies in the W3C, it is just that it is taking some time for volunteer programmers to implement the standards that they came out with in Firefox.
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The Tomato firmware in my router does something very similar using Ajax. I don't know enough about Ajax to know if what he did qualifies as a hack, though.
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JavaScript+Canvas
JavaScript+SVG
Java
Looks like that's 3 interactive charting methods without flash and flex. I'm sure the list could be bigger.
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JavaScript+Canvas
Last time I checked Canvas wasn't supported in IE and HTML 5 (which it is included as a part of) isn't out yet as a released standard. Might be a good stopgap before svg full is supported, but is it really that much easier to implement than SVG or do you give up something?
JavaScript+SVG
This would be ideal, but animations aren't yet supported, so you would have to download new svgs with AJAX for interactivity. That seems like an unfortunate hack to me. Better to have the svgs be able to dynamically update more discre
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I'm not sure precisely what you mean. I've seen apps where javascript is embedded in SVG (the way it is more typically embedded in HMTL) to produce an interactive app; attaching event handlers to graphical objects produces what in effect are widgets. The combination of drawing, scripting and event handlers essentially means you have a GUI platform. Add some model for javascript to do communication and I'd say you have a pretty complete syste
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Perhaps the acronyms the original poster was searching for could be found h
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Assuming the first, replace horses by potatoes, or whatever suits you better, it really doesn't matter as long as you ge
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A better analogy is that optimizing HTTP for flash is like optimizing a transport truck to carry frozen meat by installing refrigeration systems when it only has to carry it from 4-8 PM every second Sunday. A much more optimal solution is to just pack the meat better so it doesn't need such aa truck - ie, if there are problems sending flash over HTTP, then optimize flash to travel over HTTP (after all you don't use it
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Excuse me, are there only two major browsers? So far today I've used Safari and Opera on an eMac and Konqueror, Firefox and Opera on Kubuntu. I did play with Lynx as well, but I stopped as I had to go outside.
I don't know how well Safari, Opera (Max|Linux|Windows), Konqueror or Firefox support SVG.
Yours
An outraged browser user
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Any Flash implementation would be by definition a hack. The difference is, as you say, there's actually an open standard for AJAX.
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That's why it's a stupid comment. It would be akin to me saying they should redesign bittorrent around ISO files because I download them over it. It isn't the fact that the comment is idiotic that pisses me off, it is that the editors left it in there and decided to post it to the front pag
What Flash Does that Others Don't (Score:1)
* Video Playback
* Audio Playback
* A/V Capture thru connected devices with appropriate security
* Bitmap manipulation ala Displacement Maps, Blur, Glow, or other direct bitmap manipulation (for both video effects as well as photoshop style web apps)
there will be a place for flash (and maybe silverlight once it actually does these well).
And the comments like 'I've never found a
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Flash ecosystem... (Score:2)
I'm sure a whole bunch of security researchers (and "security researchers") have done so and are rubbing their hands with glee.
Just look at where Adobe took PDF - from the early relatively safe years to the javascript ridden present.
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Flash is the web's single point of failure (Score:4, Interesting)
Flash, ActiveX et al: incomplete planning (Score:1)
at this point it appears that NO PLANNING has been done to secure these vehicles from spreading trojans and various un-authorized programming
am I to accept one certificate from a web site and take that as credentials for every page on that site?
this plan has been available for a while now, yet CyberCrime is flourishing. and CyberCrime generally relies on trojans: un-authorized programming.
with polymorphic virus changing their colors rapidl
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693 [launchpad.net]
Basically an app will announce what sort of template sandbox it would want to be run as, and a user will decide whether it's OK or not. If OK, the OS will enforce the sandbox.
If an app claims to be a "guest game/applet" AND requests that it be run likewise, it won't be able to do much.
Whereas if an app claims to be a "guest game/applet" but actually requests "Full System Privileges" (the OS/GUI should pop up the usual warn
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I've proposed sandbox security templates
Might I suggest you champion the inclusion of SELinux by default in distros. It would at least allow security minded application designers to solve their part of the problem.
Basically an app will announce what sort of template sandbox it would want to be run as, and a user will decide whether it's OK or not. If OK, the OS will enforce the sandbox.
I think this is about 1/3 of the solution. First, if an app is going to announce itself, it might as well be specific and come with a full ACL describing what it should be doing, thus providing finer grained security and preventing some overflow style attacks. Second, since such a system does not address malware, it needs to be pai
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"First, if an app is going to announce itself, it might as well be specific and come with a full ACL describing what it should be doing,"
Should only do this for custom ACLs.
Most apps should be able to fall under a more manageable set of template ACLs that users can recognize.
Custom system ACLs could be signed by the OS vendor, so no prompts to the user - stuff just runs.
Custom 3rd party ACLs could be signed by a verifier that certifie
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Doesn't then 'signing' become the single point of failure?
In the same vein, Firefox, IE, Safari & Opera also 'render pages executable'. So we are supposed to
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that doesn't matter: with PGP you can sign anything.
the point is that before we can allow the FLASH to start we have to find a signature for it ( as a symbol in the document header )
==>who does the signing? you do.
this is what the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is all about.
if I don't have a copy of your public key I will go to a certificate authority to get it.
and that, of course leads to the question of how that Certificate Authority will insure that they
Re:Flash is the web's single point of failure (Score:4, Informative)
> over the web (like active X) or if it has it's own
> sandboxed java-like pseudo code.
I don't think java uses pseudo code
You were probably thinking of byte code. Yes, the flash plugin runs byte code in a sandboxed virtual machine. It's not the browsers sandbox, but the flash players sandbox.
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Anyone else find it ironic... (Score:2)
Upgrading the HTTP protocol? (Score:1)
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Hmm. just like how HTTP Sessions work
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HTTP stands for hypertext transfer protocol. Should we abolish all cases where HTTP is used to transport something different than hypertext? Sorry, no AJAX for you, no file downloads, no webdav, no rss, etc.
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HTTP 1.1 (RFC 2616) clearly defines what HTTP is used for:
As for logging into websites: Cookies were a hack added on to HTTP by Netscape, and aren't even in the HTTP 1.1 standard. You can have 'sessions' without cookies. An ideal login system would have your HTTP authentication
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News doesn't' surprise me (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple's WebKit has succeeded beyond Apple's wildest dreams. It is officially being used at Google for its applications, it has been adopted by KDE, and the Gnome team is also about to adopt it. It is also the official rendering engine for Android. That puts WebKit on each Linux distribution and on what will soon become a major portable Internet device platform.
Adobe has been pushing Flash as the web rendering engine to rule the world, but it hasn't been doing so well. The big war for the browser isn't the desktop, but all the little devices that we will all carry around: PDAs, Phones, cameras, music players, game machines, etc. Flash needs a consumer client in order to work, and the fact that all of these devices will depend upon Adobe creating a client for each and every platform and operating system just doesn't cut it. Manufacturers don't want Adobe to rule whether their device is worthy of a Flash client.
In order for Adobe to be truly competitive in this fight, they must open up the Flash file specifications. That way, each device maker can design their own Flash player much the same way they build their own web browser according to HTTP/HTML specs.
The only question I have is how "open" is the spec? What happens if Adobe wants a new version of Flash with more features? Will it open up the new specs? Will Adobe allow me to create a program that will write to the Flash file format, or is that still closed to me? This isn't entirely unheard of. Microsoft has "open specs" for NTFS. I can give my operating system the ability to read NTFS, but not the ability to write it without first getting a license from Microsoft.
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Good idea (Score:2)
This is apart of a larger "openening" of Flash (Score:4, Informative)
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Why haven't they?
And more importantly, can we please stop taking Flash seriously until they do?
Being "closed" is part of Flash's attraction. (Score:2)
Flash is barely "available for Linux": there's a Linux port that's only for i32, only for gecko-based browsers, and I doubt it'll work if you're not right up-to-the-minute up-to-date with a pretty vanilla distro. And of course it's not available for other free UNIX platforms or non-x86 hardware. That's because far from being "open", it's a closed binary blob.
But more than not being open source, it's not an open format. The fact t
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Flash for Linux requirements? (Score:2)
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At least Konqueror is open source so if you're stuck you can try and fix it from that side.
But the Flash side of things is closed by intent.
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If Adobe messes up their netscape plugin support by making assumptions about the API that are simply undefined behaviors that only Gecko happens to implement that way, they aren't going to fix that, instead KDE will have to emulate yet another obscure Gecko behavior.
OK, so maybe you don't care about API creep. As someone who has watc
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Flash client is still closed (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, I can't believe this. Slashdot, which gave Sun so much crap for making Java source code available under a wrong kind of license, is front page-advocating wider adoption of software, for which no source code is available at all ...
Re:Flash client is still closed (Score:5, Insightful)
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In my humble opinion a way to grow is opening up the code that people
can improve.
For the world of flash having to see a silverligth is the same as for Java
having a flash (it happened some time ago).
What I mean is hard to explain.
With flash you can do a lot of thing.
Some one admitted that Flash it is not 99% bad.
And it is growing I suppose, I hope in the right direction.
Opening up the client is, at the moment, a way that I cannot see were
can let us go.
We can go were we wa
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Forget improving. I'd like to be able to simply compile a native version for my FreeBSD/amd64 system. As things stand, there is not even a version for Windows/x64!
Something tells me, Slashdot's outrage about Microsoft's anti-competitiveness back then had little to do with the fate of Netscape. All Microsoft had to do to appease most people here, was to release a Linux version of IE.
I'm Confused (Score:2, Funny)
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W3C should take a better look at Flash (Score:2, Insightful)
Rendering Flash HTML and PDFs together (Score:1)
Regarding the RTMP (Score:5, Informative)
Adobe recently announced [adobe.com] to make it's messaging server open source. This includes the RTMP, of course.
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DATA, not PROGRAMS (Score:2)
why?
i want inert DATA, not active executable programs when i browse the web.
browsing the web should not require throwing away basic security precautions, nor should it require trusting every developer of every web site out there to not be either incompetent or malicious.
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This is a good thing(tm): a de facto standard becoming open;)
got me the flash block too (Score:1)
I went out and got me the add-on and it is now in effect.
actually I don't want anyone running any un-authorized programs on my computer
hackers in particular, but advertisers can be pretty onerous
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Just do what I do. Dont install flash. Simple.
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Videos are a useful form of communication. It's unfortunate that sites like YouTube are Flash based, but until there's an alternative, Flash + NoScript works great.
Re:flash is for ads - so I block it (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, there are uses for Flash apart from ads. Many websites use it for embedded audio, video, instant messaging, simple image editing, games, and basically any interactive functionality which would be too slow and hackish to implement using AJAX.
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Flash is useful for a lot more than just Youtube. While video is possibly the most common use for Flash (it's the only *standard* that all browser makers can agree on) it's also used for purposes like web games. I know in of itself that's not all that interesting, but it's also one of two ways of making homebrews [wiicade.com] for the Wii Internet Channel.
The AMF format has been reverse engineered before, but having it fully published should make it easier to create desktop integratio
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