Confessions of a control freak and an anecdote about AMF
If you haven’t read part 1, it’s there for the reading, and puts this post in context.
I figure the best place to start is where the title of this series comes from: I am a control freak; in life and so in code. This is not a very positive thing to say, but in terms of my personal skills development I feel it’s important. I don’t like things that just work; I have to know why.
There is a button on my washing machine that says “anti-crease“. This bugs the hell out of me: When would I not want this setting on? What’s the trade-off? If it creases my clothes less, then what is not doing? Is it cleaning them less?
The knowledge gap
When I’m using a third-party code library I often at some point hit a brick wall. I’ve read the manual, I’ve done the examples and maybe even had some great success with it. And yet all of a sudden there’s an error; It means nothing to me and it’s coming from a part of my program that I did not write. I might try uncomfortably to debug the code, I may at a stretch even resort to hacking it, but most likely of all I’m going to hit the forums. I do not like spending my day on forums.
So there is a rational side to my reluctance to use third party code: when you write your own libraries you are investing in priceless knowledge that empowers you to fix bugs, and generally take more control of your product as a whole. Obviously this is at a massive time cost, and that is generally the biggest factor to weigh up. Do I want to write my own 3D library for Flash? No thanks! What about a light-weight template system for PHP? Yeh, maybe.
Whether this argument stands up or not, as I investigate deeper into my control-freakery it gets much less rational and just plain personal.
An anecdote about AMF (Action Message Format).
AMF is magic. You send a request off from Flash and bingo – your PHP code has executed and Flash magically has a response in its native tongue. Everything in between that made this happen just worked. This is abstraction at its finest; the problem is I just can’t stand it!
To make matters worse AMF is binary; that is to say that it is not human-readable. Using (the divine) Fiddler proxy you can switch to hex view and make out some of the text characters being sent, but in general the protocol is not friendly for this level of debugging. When something goes wrong you need the tools and the knowledge to be in control of this mysterious beast.
Enter the third party: The obvious choice of AMF library for PHP used to be amfphp. This project has since been absorbed by the Zend framework, but I’m afraid my anecdote is a year old.
What I wanted from amfphp was literally a library; just a set of functions like amf_serialize, amf_get_header, stuff like that, so I could build a request gateway into my wider application. What I got was something that behaved more like a framework providing what appeared to be a totally sealed end-to-end process. My application ran on its own framework, so what I ended up with was two code bases, both saying “I’m the daddy!”. I’d set up an error handler; amfphp would override it, breaking my code. I’d start a session; but amfphp has already started one, breaking my code, and so on.. and don’t get me started on __autoload!
Looking under the hood of amfphp, it did not look like I could easily separate its infrastructure from its superstructure. I guess I just didn’t know nearly enough about AMF. This gave me an itch I just had to scratch.
Should I build my own?
I agonized over whether this was the right decision and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t.
So I did it anyway.
Work started by reading the (rather sketchy) AMF specifications published by Adobe. I did this on the tube for a week. After reading them several times I predictably decided that it was very doable and I would learn a lot from it. A small Flash project kicked off at work with an AMF back end, so every evening for a week I hammered out my own library.
By the end of this project AMF was no longer a mysterious, magical thing that just worked. It made actual sense, I could control it better, and I was able to add features to our projects such as debugging tools. I even discovered that I could harness parts of the protocol that I would not even have known about simply by using amfphp.
My library was never fully completed, and I’m in no doubt that it is inferior to amfphp in many ways, but that’s not the point. It was a reminder to myself that this is why I’m a control freak – to be in a position of power and not a slave to tools available.