New PyAMF Release Improves Support for Google App Engine

Posted by Moxie Zhang on May 10, 2008

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PyAMF 0.3.1 was released this week, just in time to meet the increased interest on Python and RIA generated by the recent preview release of Google App Engine and the announcement of Adobe's Open Screen Project.

PyAMF is an open source project that provides action message format (AMF) support for Python. This allows for AMF-based communication between Python-powered Web servers and rich Internet application (RIA) clients in Flash, Flex or AIR.

Google App Engine (GAE) enables users to build Web applications on the same scalable systems used by Google, so that they can expand from one user to millions of users without the need to rebuild infrastructure. The release of PyAMF 0.3.1 improves support for GAE and introduces a new AMF gateway for GAE Web applications.

Adobe's Open Screen Project further opens core Adobe data/file formats, such as SWF and FLV, the fundamental elements for Flash/Flex-based RIA applications. Adobe Integrated Runtime and Flash Player use AMF for communications between an application and a remote server. AMF encodes remote procedure calls (RPC) into compact binary representations that can be transferred over HTTP/HTTPS or the RTMP/RTMPS protocol. PyAMF enables the development of Flex-based RIA applications along with a GAE backend, thus putting RIA into the Google cloud computing platform.

With the 0.3.1 release, PyAMF offers many special features, including:

• AMF0 encoder/decoder for legacy Flash Players (version 6-8).
• AMF3 encoder/decoder for the new AMF format in Flash Player 9.
• Support for IExternalizable, ArrayCollection, ObjectProxy, ByteArray (with zlib support), RecordSet and RemoteObject
• Remoting gateways for Twisted, Django, TurboGears2, Web2Py, Pylons and any compatible WSGI framework.
• Authentication/setCredentials support
• Remoting client using httplib with authentication support
• Service Browser (DescribeService header) requests support
• Local shared object (LSO) support
• Adapter framework to integrate with third-party Python projects

Aral Balkan, the ARP Flex Framework creator, has already taken PyAMF, GAE and Flex into account. Balkan has announced a GAE SWF Project that uses PyAMF and is “a resource of Flash and Flex-related knowledge specifically aimed at getting you up and running quickly with Google App Engine, a wonderful platform for building and deploying massively-scalable Flash and Flex applications.”

Other examples of PyAMF/ GAE projects include Flex Python Shell and PyAMF Test Suite.

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