Unit testing is becoming a fairly common element of software projects because of its promise of providing better quality to the code base. A unit test is a class or method that exercises your code for purposes of verifying that it functions correctly. During the course of your project, these tests remain as artifacts that can be used over and over again to verify that your code is always working correctly. The higher percentage of your production code you exercise, the higher degree of certainty you can have that your code is doing what it was designed to do.

One of the reasons I love PHP is that all I have to deal with is back-end code. I am absolutely horrible at anything resembling design, this includes information design. Recently Ryan Stewart wrote a quick blog post showing how to use Flex and PHP to build charts in your applications. Click on in and I’ll dig up the link for you.

May 10 – 14 2010. Free, online sessions for PHP developers interested in learning about the Adobe Flash Platform, including: What’s New in Flash Builder 4 for PHP Developers; Using Advanced Features with Flex & PHP; and A Basic CRUD Application with Zend_AMF and Flex 4

The recent release of Adobe Flash Builder 4 Beta (formerly Adobe Flex Builder) includes an impressive lineup of features aimed at enterprise PHP development, in large part because of a partnership with Zend & Zend Framework. This tutorial will describe how to use the new data-centric features of Flash Builder for PHP development.

The best applications for the
rich Internet connect to the server to both read and write data. So,
the easier it is to get data from the server and send data back to it,
the quicker you can develop some awesome applications.

Reading and posting to
Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based services with Adobe
Flex is easy.
But what’s even easier is using Adobe’s Action
Message Format (AMF) to send messages between the Flex client and the
server. It’s as easy to use as a method call on an object.

This
article written by Jack Herrington shows how to set up an AMF service on your PHP web server using
the Zend Framework and Zend_Amf.

As of version 1.7, Zend Framework includes an extension for native Adobe Action Message Format (AMF) communication between Adobe Flash Platform applications and PHP. The Zend Framework includes extensions for a vast array of common programming tasks, including database connectivity and abstraction, e-mail, authentication, and third-party application programming interface (API) access. Most of these are useful in Flex applications, and with Zend_Amf, leveraging them has never been easier. In this article, you create a Flex application that takes advantage of some useful Zend Framework extensions.

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.

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.