AMF from Perl
The other day I was at the MIF Onsite II, in Barcelona. MIF Onsite was presenting the upcoming Flex 3 and AIR development environments. The presentations were nice, and Adobe had a little lunch prepared for us.
Flex can, of course, talk to the servers making bare HTTP requests. It also supports web services (SOAP). But one of the interesting things was AMF (a protocol for "Remoting"... that is using objects, and calling methods on a remote server). You'll say: "big deal! another one!". The interesting bit is that it is more optimal for transmission through the wire (it isn't as heavy as XML, which you have to construct, parse, is pretty redundant, etc). On a couple of slides they referenced languages with support for AMF. Those were PHP, .NET, and Java. Like a devote Perl programmer I just had to ask if there was a Perl implementation. I asked if there was something for the python boys too! The presenters where quite sure that there was a Python implementation, and it seems like a pretty nice one: PyAMF, but for the perl boys... they hadn't heard of anything.
A quick search got me to a Perl implementation AMF::Perl. But one thing doesn't convince me: "AMF::Perl - Flash Remoting in Perl Translated from PHP Remoting v. 0.5b from the -PHP project.". PHPAMF is in version 2.0 beta now, and AMF::Perl hasn't been touched since 19/Sep/2004. Since I can't find AMFPHP historic, I don't know which features were added to PHPAMF that the Perl implementation is lacking.
I'll try to contact the author to see if he can update on the status of the project.