REST, Flash Player, Flex

In doing some experiments with Flex and RESTful architecture, I realized that there seems to be a whole lot of problems. Flash Player was designed to support traditional HTTP web access such as form posting or resource retrieval using GET and POST. So a number of features that are used in RESTful design are not supported by Flash Player. People have written additional client-side or on server-side kludges to work around the problems with HTTP support in Flash Player. Most of the server side changes are hacks, and the client-side changes are in external third-party libraries, which are sometimes missing crucial features like cookies, TLS, etc. Even in the best possible scenario, you still need to provide crossdomain policy file even if the Flash application is accessing resources on the same server. One of the reasons I suspect is that Flash Player relies on the browser for HTTP support, and hence supports only the lowest common set of features, which are not enough for REST architecture.

What is the solution? Depends on what you want to do.

1. If you have control over server-side of the system, you need to incorporate certain kludges to support Flash restrictions. For example, provide crossdomain policy-file, map some header or URL to method PUT and DELETE, return 200 success response with message body containing actual error code (e.g., 404 vs 405 vs 501) or headers. Any of these techniques looks like a hack at best.
2. If you have control over the client, you can use an existing third-party RESTful client library in ActionScript. However, be prepared to provide a crossdomain policy-file or incorporate a proxy. Alternatively, you can also perform some Flash Player-specific translations on the fly in your proxy.
3. Use Flash Player's ExternalInterface mechanism and incorporate your RESTful client code in JavaScript. This is sometimes not easy, error-free or feasible. Moreover, now your Flash application depends on your Javascript.

What are the problems with these solutions?

1. You cannot build a general purpose RESTful web application (server-side) and expect Flash Player application to use them. You will need to be Flash Player-aware.
2. You cannot build a general purpose Flash application (client-side) to use an existing RESTful web service without additional dependencies and network elements (proxies).

What is the real solution?

1. It looks like HTTP+REST won't really be able to solve all the problems in ActionScript for Flash Player without Adobe's blessings, e.g., incorporate full HTTP stack in the Flash Player or provide a different way other than crossdomain to do authentication of scripts.

Some additional references [1, 2, 3, 4]