Alessandro Crugnola has posted an update on the future of the AMFPHP project (an interface between Adobe's Flex products and PHP) and how it relates to the work being done on the Zend Framework's Zend_Amf component.

But after the partnership between Zend and Adobe things started to change and amfphp started to move forward to the Zend Framework... and in fact many developers were afraid about the real future of amfphp. But, as Wade said, the amfphp core will remain separated from the framework implementation ( a framework which I will never use however ), in order to have a shared core and 2 different branches for the implementation.

He notes, though, that he might be being a bit skeptical, but doesn't see things working out in their favor and that Zend_Amf will "win out" over the AMFPHP project and get the larger share of the backing from the larger companies.

Andi Gutmans has pointed out an effort that Adobe has proposed that would go a long way towards adding AMF support to the Zend Framework.

This ZF component will allow for client-side applications built with Flex and Adobe AIR to communicate easily and efficiently with PHP on the server-side. Leading the design of the component for Adobe is Wade Arnold. Wade already has a track record of bringing the Adobe RIA technologies to PHP as a result of all of his work on AMFPHP.

Andi sees this as a next logical step to helping the framework become more "Enterprise oriented" and to compliment the recent Dojo integration. The plan is to release it with the 1.7 version of the framework, but the actual timing may vary due to the approval process.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new tutorial today (from Richard Bates) about creating PDF forms from inside a Flex application with a little help from PHP.

Leveraging the power of PHP and a PDF generation library called dompdf, you can create a simple, seamless user experience in Adobe Flex. Flex enables you to create an outstanding presentation to the end-user, with instant validation of user-supplied data and the full power of ActionScript 3. Through AMFPHP, you'll gain access to PHP's full toolset, enabling virtually limitless applications.

They show how to install the needed packages - AMFPHP and the dompdf PHP package to make the PDF generation easy ("one of the best PDF tools for PHP you can get"). The rest is the creation of the Flex part of the application - generating the form and using PHP to push out a PDF file at the other end, complete with their data.

In trying to get PHP, AMFPHP and Flash to cooperate together with ByteArray information, Alessandro Crugnola came across some issues:

Recently I made some test in AMFPHP sending an retrieving ByteArray to be stored in a mysql blob field. But suddenly I encounter a problem when I was trying to return an array of ByteArrays and I could not find out the reason flash continued to show me [an] error.

He includes the offending code on both the PHP and ActionScript side and his ultimate solution - a problem with AMFPHP's serializer. He's even made a patch file if you're seeing the same issue and want to bring your install up to date.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new tutorial talking about one developer's method for creating a link between Flex and Drupal to create a data entry form.

Why Flex? Because I'd like to be able to put the widget on any site and Ajax has security issues there. Web browsers, quite rightly, ensure that Ajax pages only request data from their server of origin. So it's much harder to host an Ajax widgets on external sites without kludges like IFrames or Script tag data transit. Flex allows data access from different servers. So it's far easier to write widgets that can be hosted externally.

You'll already need Drupal installed to start working with the tutorial - he chose Mac OS X as his platform of choice, but this setup will work with any installation that supports Flex. He uses the AMF protocol to interface with the PHP scripts on the backend (via AMFPHP) and a small update will need to be made to Drupal to get it to cooperate.

The rest of the tutorial shows how to create the Flex interface - making a simple information form that takes in a user's name, address and phone number and updates the Drupal contact information for them.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new tutorial talking about one developer's method for creating a link between Flex and Drupal to create a data entry form.

Why Flex? Because I'd like to be able to put the widget on any site and Ajax has security issues there. Web browsers, quite rightly, ensure that Ajax pages only request data from their server of origin. So it's much harder to host an Ajax widgets on external sites without kludges like IFrames or Script tag data transit. Flex allows data access from different servers. So it's far easier to write widgets that can be hosted externally.

You'll already need Drupal installed to start working with the tutorial - he chose Mac OS X as his platform of choice, but this setup will work with any installation that supports Flex. He uses the AMF protocol to interface with the PHP scripts on the backend (via AMFPHP) and a small update will need to be made to Drupal to get it to cooperate.

The rest of the tutorial shows how to create the Flex interface - making a simple information form that takes in a user's name, address and phone number and updates the Drupal contact information for them.

Alessandro Crugnola was struggling with an application he was developing (with Flex and PHP) where his local PHP installation worked just fine but his remote system errored on the same code:

Connecting to the service browser I was receiving the error "Channel.Ping.Failed" error and investingating a bit more in the fault message I discovered that the source error was: "The class {Amf3Broker} could not be found under the class path {/var/htdocs/amfphp/services/amfphp/Amf3Broker.php}" and the Amf3Broker php class does not exists anywhere in amfphp!

Despite some default settings he found, though, things still weren't loading correctly. Finally, he found the culprit - mbstring. One server had the setting to overload the strings and the other didn't resulting in the return of corrupted data from the amfphp stream.

Alessandro Crugnola was struggling with an application he was developing (with Flex and PHP) where his local PHP installation worked just fine but his remote system errored on the same code:

Connecting to the service browser I was receiving the error "Channel.Ping.Failed" error and investingating a bit more in the fault message I discovered that the source error was: "The class {Amf3Broker} could not be found under the class path {/var/htdocs/amfphp/services/amfphp/Amf3Broker.php}" and the Amf3Broker php class does not exists anywhere in amfphp!

Despite some default settings he found, though, things still weren't loading correctly. Finally, he found the culprit - mbstring. One server had the setting to overload the strings and the other didn't resulting in the return of corrupted data from the amfphp stream.

If you missed the previous PHP/Flex online seminar from Adobe, Mike Potter has some good news for you - there's another one coming up on July 17th.

For those of you who missed my first online e-seminar for PHP developers, I'll be hosting another one on July 17th (next Tuesday). The content will be fairly similar, but instead of using AMFPHP I'll use WebORB for PHP, which was updated last week to 2.0.

You can register for the session here.

If you missed the previous PHP/Flex online seminar from Adobe, Mike Potter has some good news for you - there's another one coming up on July 17th.

For those of you who missed my first online e-seminar for PHP developers, I'll be hosting another one on July 17th (next Tuesday). The content will be fairly similar, but instead of using AMFPHP I'll use WebORB for PHP, which was updated last week to 2.0.

You can register for the session here.