I’ve found myself enjoying working with Adobe Flex. Flex does a lot of things really well, except its support of the HTTP protocol. Here’s a few things folks don’t know about the Flash Players HTTP support:

• It only support GET and POST methods. In order to use other methods such as DELETE and PUT, you have to the proxy service in Live Cycle Data Services. Lame!
• The Flash Player can’t read entity responses if a service returns a response code higher than 200. The LDS proxy gets around this limitation by forcing the response to a 200 status and returning the fault entity. Without LDS, there’s no way to get the response entity. Still lame.
• You are extremely limited to the number of header values you can set. The following header values cannot be used by the URLRequestHeader class: Accept-Charset, Accept-Encoding, Accept-Ranges, Age, Allow, Allowed, Connection, Content-Length, Content-Location, Content-Range, Date, Delete, ETag, Expect, Get, Host, Keep-Alive, Last-Modified, Location, Max-Forwards, Options, Post, Proxy-Authenticate, Proxy-Authorization, Public, Put, Range, Referer, Retry-After, Server, TE, Trace, Trailer, Transfer-Encoding, Upgrade, URI, User-Agent, Vary, Via, Warning, WWW-Authenticate, x-flash-version.

These features are extremely limiting for an RIA platform. It’s not always easy to try an sell RIA solution that is based on a platform crippled by limited networking support. I sincerely hope that future incarnations can get around these issues by providing a real HTTP implementation.