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.

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.

Mike Potter shines a spotlight on a new web conferencing system created by Vyew that's being set up as a competitor to Adobe's Acrobat Connect.

Vyew allows you to share and collaborate on documents, including Microsoft Office files, photos and videos. However, unlike Connect, Vyew is based on Flash and PHP, and uses AMFPHP for messaging between the client and the server.

They (Vyew) compare themselves to Adobe's product in an included comparison chart. You can also check out video demos of the application in action or check out some screenshots to get a feel for how it works.

Making a good thing out of a bad situation, Mike Potter has a new post on the RIApedia blog today detailing issues he's had at this year's php|tek conference surrounding his machine.

I was all set to present at the PHP|Tek show here in Chicago yesterday when I encountered a very (very very) ugly hard drive failure, 3 slides into my deck. [...] If you're looking for similar slides, these ones from a previous presentation in New York are close [pdf], though not exactly the same.

So, in lieu of the slides, he's shared lots of great links for the things he was going to talk about in his presentation including:

• Picnik
• the Flex Showcase
• Cal Evans' Flex and PHP tutorial
• the JSON library and AMFPHP combination

As Mike Potter mentions in his new blog entry, Flash, Flex and PHP just got a great leg up when it comes to using the combination:

Patrick Mineault, who runs the AMFPHP project, has released a new version of AMFPHP 1.9, beta 2 now. However, the real big news in his blog post was the news that there is now a C based AMF extension for PHP.

According to the test data Patrick gives, the speed jump is well worth implementing the different functionality - a 100% boost, in fact, than the standard PHP version of AMFPHP. Check out Patrick's blog for the rest of these amazing stats.

In this new blog post, Mike Potter points out two examples of the AMFPHP package in action as provided by Renaun Erickson.

The source code to both examples is available as well. (You did know that Flex applications have the option of publishing the source code right? [...] To publish the source code for your own application, in Flex Builder select Project -> Publish Application Source...)

He also mentions an upcoming update to the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe to include some of these sorts of examples. Check out the mailing list for more.