Stefan Schmalhaus has suggested an alternative approach for setting up a Zend Action Message Format (AMF) server. His approach makes it easy to add Flex and HTML interfaces to an application at a later date: “Many tutorials suggest that you set up the Zend AMF server directly in the bootstrap or index.php file. But what if you want to build a hybrid application with both Flex and HTML interfaces? In this case it’s better to let the bootstrap file do its usual job of application dispatching, and to make the AMF gateway a controller. If you’re interested in building AMF support into your application, Stefan’s views on how to better organize your code will almost certainly be of interest.

Adobe’s technical evangelism team is packing up the bus and hitting the road to show PHP User Groups how cool Flex and PHP can be when used together.

p. There is big news in the Zend Framework world this morning. Zend and Adobe are working together to put support for AMF into the framework.

For end-users, the ability to output a PDF from your application is expected as a standard feature. But as a developer, implementing PDF output can be a major expense and headache, especially when developing for the web. You could just instruct the user to print the necessary pages from a browser to a PDF virtual printer, but that requires extra software on the client, and the browser will add information to the printed page. Traditional programmatic PDF creation can be painstaking, often requiring the developer to do very complex calculations just to place text on the page. PDF generation on the web usually requires root access and complicated installations on the server. But all that is about to change. Leveraging the power of PHP and a PDF generation library called dompdf, you can create a simple, seamless user experience in Adobe Flex.

What makes the web fun? Is it the cool applications like Google Maps, which are neat but not particularly fun? Is it social networks like Facebook? Sure, that’s a little fun. But what really gets passed around the web? Viral video. Nothing catches our interest like video and images, which is ironic, as the HTML technology for uploading media to web sites is one of the worst parts of browsers.

Let’s face it: Interactive graphs and dashboards have never been easy to put together on the web. Sure, there are graphing libraries out there for PHP, but to get something that looks really good and that a user can play with has been tough. Or at least, it was yesterday. Today, I show how to use a combination of PHP for the back end and Adobe Flex for the front end that will put interactive 3D within your grasp. Right now. Today. Let’s dig in.

Whether you’re an enterprise developer working in a large shop or setting up a blog for yourself, you’ve almost certainly been tasked with keeping your development code in sync with some type of stable release. Whether a project is big or small, you still need to ensure that the core code you work with remains consistent. This article will walk you through the development of an Adobe AIR and AJAX application used to synchronize the modules of a site developed in Drupal, the popular free and open-source content management system used in thousands of sites across the Internet.

Flash and PHP are becoming a popular pair of technologies. It seems that every time I turn around, I’m seeing new Flash front-ends that are talking to PHP back-ends and doing some very interesting things. One of the most interesting things I’ve seen though has to be MyKleenexTissue.com. I was given the opportunity to sit down and talk with Andy Lintner, Director of Application Development, Jon Aniano, General Manager, and Jeff Kazmierski, President and Creative Director; all of Active Media Architects, the team behind MyKleenexTissue.com. Along the way we talked about the technology decisions they made, and the process they used for development.

p. Since the first time I really saw and understood what Flash was and did, I’ve been jealous of what Flash designers could do. Beyond just the cute animations for banner ads and games, Flash designers have always had a much more fine-grained control on their environment that HTML allows for. Besides my innate inability to design anything like a usable interface, the main drawback that has kept me from exploiting Flash is I never could get my head around the “Movie Timeline” metaphor for programming. As we say back home, “It just ain’t right.” That all changed with Flex. Now programmers can work with tools they are comfortable with and still take advantage of all of Flash’s…well, flash. Flex won’t help developers like me design eye-pleasing interfaces any more than a new pencil would improve my inability to draw. However, I can now put much more useful interfaces on my back-end code.

p. Athlon Sports is tucked away in a non-descript building near downtown Nashville. Inside is a 40 year old company, well respected in their field that has been, not so quietly, moving into the world of on-line games.