'Pushing' messages to Flex clients with AmFast

One of the coolest aspects of Flex development is the ability to 'push' messages from the server to clients. With the newest release of AmFast, you can finally utilize this capability with all of the goodness of Python. This will be the 1st of 3 posts describing how you can use the AmFast Flash remoting package to push messages to Flex clients from a Python server.

AmFast supports pushing messages to clients over HTTP using 3 different strategies: polling, long-polling, and streaming. Here is a good article describing the differences between those strategies. Go ahead and skip past the XML configuration sections, since you won't need any XML to configure AmFast :)

Streaming channels deliver messages in real time, but also consume the most server resources. Standard polling consumes the least amount of server resources, but is also the slowest of the three strategies. Long-polling sits in the middle and offers a nice compromise between latency and resource consumption.

AmFast has built-in support for using any of the 3 messaging strategies with either a multi-threaded WSGI server, or the Twisted web framework. One thing to think about when implementing a multi-threaded server is that any client using long-polling or streaming may consume a thread for a significant amount of time, even if all it's doing is waiting for a new message. I haven't done any tests, but I'm guessing that Twisted's single-threaded, asynchronous design can handle more concurrent connections then a multi-threaded implementation.

On the client side, the Actionscript Consumer class is used to receive messages from a server, and the Producer class is used to send messages to a server. Any type of object can be pushed to clients, so the same technology can be used to build many different types of applications.

In the next post I'll explain the details of using AmFast's HTTP polling and HTTP long-polling channels to create a simple chat client. In the following post I'll show an example of using HTTP streaming to create an app where a master client can manipulate a graphical entity on the screen, and changes are replicated to all other subscribed clients.