Speaking of Flash…I’ve been messing around with Flash MX and its support for persistent, two-way streaming connections via the XMLSocket stuff. Interesting point: you can do arbitrary HTTP requests by shoehorning the text of the request into a malformed XML document:

socket = new XMLSocket();

socket.onData = function (src)
{
    trace("\ndata:" + src);
}

if (!socket.connect("my.example.com", 80))
{
    trace ("connect: Connection failed!")
}

var req = "POST /mod_pubsub/demo HTTP/1.0\n" +
    "User-Agent: FlashMX Client (Win2K)\n" +
    "Host: my.example.com\n" +
    "Content-Length: 12\n" +
    "Content-Type: text/plain\n\n" +
    "Hello World!";

var xml = new XML(req);
socket.send(xml);

Through this, I’ve been able to hook up Flash MX to a KnowNow event router (the same should work for mod_pubsub, but I haven’t tested it yet) with varying degrees of success. A small sticking point seems to be that any returned data has to be terminated with a null character (like “%00″) or the data handlers won’t fire. But it’s encouraging to know that you can effectively speak HTTP over XMLSocket without having to speak XML.

Previously: Unswitch

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