Communication between c++ and actionscript 3

Question

Is it possible to use any IPC mechanism for calling a c++ api from Adobe Flash actionscript? Are there any good examples?

Update: I primarily want it for desktop apps now i.e Adobe's/or anyuone else's desktop runtimes

Answer 1

It is not possible from the browser-player. From an AIR application, you can use Socket API to do IPC.

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/net/Socket.html?allClasses=1

Answer 2

If you target the Adobe AIR runtime, you can leverage the NativeProcess API that was introduced in AIR 2.0. This API allows you to spawn external processes and communicate with them via stdin and stdout.

If you're feeling adventurous and want to do something undocumented and completely unsupported, you can tap into the LocalConnection internals by interacting with the memory mapped file of the Flash Player. There's more detail on the osflash.org/localconnection site. This approach has some limitations and isn't supported. I don't recommend it.

As mentioned in some other answers, you can also use a socket connection to send/receive data.

Answer 3

Not from the flash player, as it would very likely violate its security model. You can call C++ from the Tamarin VM, which for example mod-actionscript is doing. An option would be to pass your calls to an AS3-server, call some C++ functions there and send back the result. Another option is to cross-compile the C++ code to AVM2 using alchemy. But if you want to call C++ to access features on the client machine not available from the flash player (file system access, UDP or whatever), then there's no way.

edit:
Ok, I suppose there are the following options:

• have a look at the flash.accessibility package and solve it with AS3 only
• create a C++ daemon running in the background, which can have bidirectional communication with flash through
  • a local socket (you'd bind a port in the daemon and the flash client would connect to it) with a custom protocol
  • a LocalConnection. This looks a little better from the AS3 perspective, but requires a little hacking on the C++ side, since you need to get hold of the connection and implement the protocol (pointers here)
• use an alternative runtime: adobe air, zinc, swhx (requires Haxe though and the "backend" is neko, but neko can easily be extended)