i had no idea flash has gzip built into it..thats very cool to know..or maybe its the browser that has it

in anycase looking forward to the code

john

Compression is outside the scope of this and can easily be added on top of this. Gzip could be added by your web server and is supported by Flash built-in and completely transparent. Simply set up e.g. Apache to compress the response and Flash will automatically decompress once received before passing the response back to your handler.

MXHR have another benefit besides from packing stuff together in a single request – it is also streaming, and you could actually load one small file and one large file in said order and in Flash you could the display the small file as soon as it was loaded – without waiting until the large file was downloaded as well. If this wasn’t possible, this concept wouldn’t have been as interesting.

The “packaging” method, that I used is mime and the content-type “multipart/mixed”. This is a documented way of transferring multiple responses in a single stream somewhat like attachments in emails. I felt no need to re-invent neither packaging nor compression and simply used existing best-practices.

I hope you see where I’m going :)

after i woke up and thought about it more i understand why mp3 doesnt make much sense. this is more about packaging together multiple files into one request. so it would make better sense for something like multiple json feeds/images that a flash app needs to initialize/load config settings from.

why not just use zip format then? have something like a zip client in actionscript that would unpack the files you need..this would have the added advantage of compression. do you know of any such solution for flash?

in anycase very cool work..i spent some time sniffing things out with charles and you do indeed package multiple gifs in one request..demo is most impressive

Thanks for your interest.

I don’t see the purpose of wrapping MP3′s in SWF’s, because the most interesting thing about sounds as MP3′s is, that they can play progressively – i.e. while downloading. If wrapped in a SWF it would still be possible but harder to achieve.

And the above concept, that I have constructed, does not allow for progressive download of the individual files – only when the entire file (each part of the response) is in, it is returned to the requester.

The advantage only shows when loading many files – especially small files. For instances loading picture thumbnails for a gallery, profile images for a forum post, and similar situations. For larger files the convetional load is just as good and might even be better, as it gives better control over caching etc.

I will however make sure to upload the source as soon as possible :)

the demo is very impressive. do you think it would help in delivring mp3s embedded in swf format faster? if so then we could convert mp3′s to swf and pipe around music and beats faster

seems like the next logical step is to build a class manager

hit us up with the code so we can continue this cool innovation of yours :)

john