Flash Remoting in Python?

[Jordan Krushen]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 09:58:42 -0500, Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

> >> I will note, however, that Flash's XML parser is slow, and WDDX is
> >> more compact than XML-RPC (although it isn't, in itself, an RPC
> >> protocol, unlike XML-RPC).
>
> Jordan> God, is it ever slow.  I'm working on a remote playlist editor
> Jordan> (Flash talking to Python XML-RPC), and when sending a list of
> Jordan> ~1000 entities across the wire, performance was increased nearly
> Jordan> a hundred times simply by sending one delimited string element
> Jordan> instead of 1000 XML elements.  Of course, XML adds quite a bit
> Jordan> of bloat, but all the time was consumed in CPU, not on the wire.

> Have you tried installing sgmlop, which pushes most of the XML parsing 
> into C?

It's the Flash side that's slow, not the Python one :)  Python merrily 
spits out an array of 1000 small items into XML-RPC in way under a 
second.  Unmarshalling it on the other end in Flash took noticeably 
longer.  I've taken to stripping the Flash XML-RPC library down to its 
minimum, but it's still rather slow.  The Python lib is more complete, and 
written in Python, but it's still quite a bit faster than Flash.

J.