AMF3 is Smokin’ Fast

While AJAX has some minor advantages over the Flash platform (requires no plugin...and....um, I'm sure there are others ), I usually find myself really having to dig to find any significant advantages in AJAX development. James Ward has put together a nice little Flex 2 app that gracefully shows performance comparisons between various data transfer methods. AJAX falls far short in these comparisons.

View the application here: RIA Data Loading Benchmarks

AMF3 leads the pack, but I am particularly excited to see a comparison between Flex XML E4X and Flex AMF3. AMF3 has the advantage of being a binary object format for Actionscript objects...which means less data to transfer and a much quicker render time.

James on AMF3:
The performance of loading and rendering 20000 rows is extremely fast with AMF. The bandwidth is much smaller than text based serialization methods (XML and JSON). And sort time is nearly instantaneous for all 20000 rows.

James on E4X:
This method is the fastest non-AMF method in Flex. E4X in the Flash Virtual Machine is extremely fast at querying XML structures so parsing happens very quickly. Also because the Mozilla Tamarin is JIT enabled, rendering happens extremely fast. Sorting performance is decent, but not as fast as when working with structured AS objects.