Agile Enterprise Application Development with Flex

AMF and Client-Side Serialization

AMF is crucial for all types of serialization and communications. All native data serialization is customarily handled by the class ByteArray. When serialized, the data type information is marked out by the name included in the metadata tag RemoteClass.

Example 6-1 is a small example from the Flash Builder’s NetworkingSamples project that comes with the book. It includes an application RegisteredClassvsUnregistered.mxml and two classes: RegisteredClass and Unregistered.

Example 6-1. Serialization with and without the RemoteObject meta tag

package
{
    [RemoteClass(alias="com.RegisteredClass")]
   public class RegisteredClass{
   }
}

package
{
   public class UnregisteredClass{
   }
}


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
                                    creationComplete="test()">
<mx:Script>
   <![CDATA[
      import flash.utils.ByteArray

      private function serializeDeserialize(a:Object) : void {
         var ba : ByteArray = new ByteArray();
         ba.writeObject(a);
         ba.position = 0;
         var aa:Object = ba.readObject();
         trace( aa );
      }

      private function test():void {
         serializeDeserialize( new RegisteredClass());
         serializeDeserialize( new UnregisteredClass());
      }
   ]]>
</mx:Script>
</mx:Application>

In Example 6-1, the function serializeDeserialize() serializes the object passed as an argument into a ByteArray, and then reads it back into a variable aa of type Object. The application makes two calls to this function. During the first call, it passes an object that contains ...