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. […]

The new year has just started, and to start off well the dutch PHP usergroup (phpGG) is organizing a frontend-oriented event. This event is intended for developers who get in touch with client-side technology. Not just PHP developers, also frontend developers, and everyone who has to deal with frontend stuff in some way. Whether you deal with frontends on a daily basis, or are curious to the possibilities of making a new application more attractive in a graphical sense, you can't miss out on this day. Besides all this, it's also an excellent opportunity to get a (free!) membership of phpGG! […]

Wade Arnold has a blog post on the session support in Zend_Amf_Server. In his post, he explains how sessions can be used in a Flex application (with example of how to create, regenerate and destroy sessions) and he also has some useful tips on how to secure session identifiers in Flex applications. A useful article for Flex/ZF developers!

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It's the holidays, so what better time to kick back and start learning about PHP and Flex? And to get you started, here's a recent article by Richard Bates that demonstrates just how easy it is to create PHP/Flex applications using the integrated features of Zend Studio for Eclipse and the Flex Builder 3 Eclipse Plug-in.

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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. […]

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. […]

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. […]

Drupal is a fantastically well featured, and free, content management system written in PHP. No wonder so many companies are using it internally or externally as one of their business applications. But often Drupal alone is not enough. It needs to be integrated or extended to match the needs of the organization. One way to extend it is on the front-end through something like an Ajax or Flex based widget. […]

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. […]