Web Dev Chronicles

The question is, Why? Especially when AMF is not gzipped-able.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2933429/use-amf-instead-of-json-on-iphone-for-web-services

For me the "why" is easy. I didn't have to do any work at all to be ready to provide access to cfc's I was already using for my backend Flex application and the frontend web application. To use gzip'd json or some other format would mean duplicating a pile of my code, or at the very least writing a facade to transform my data into another format.

Using amf across all platforms makes my life as a developer much easier. But of course this is a use case specific to my existing technology stack. Clearly this doesn't make any sense if you aren't currently using amf.

As a comparison, I have done the facade approach for another project. We created an api that returned zipped sqlite files to the iPhone app. This works quite well but we had to build a whole api to sit on top of existing cfc's to transform and deliver this data to the iPhone app. Had I known about CocoaAmf back then I could have saved myself about 1 weeks worth of work.