The DevX.com site has posted some code that gives you methods for passing information back and forth between PHP and a Flash application.

When you need to develop a web form with a special design and great effects, you will probably elect to use Flash. But building and programming Flash forms is considerably different from building standard HTML-based forms. [...] To do that though, you need to know how to access data in the Flash form and (sometimes) how to update the Flash form from PHP as well.

They help you build a sample Flash form as a base to work with in the transfer methods including the ActionScript to get the data out of each field. The tutorial shows the two way communication that's possible - pushing the Flash values out to the PHP script via a getURL() call and pulling the results back in with a call to loadVars() from the PHP script's output.

On the PHP Web Services blog today, Sami asks "what's missing from PHP's SOAP extension" that needs to be added or corrected.

PHP SOAP extension is good to get started, to play around with. However, it falls much short in meeting the enterprise demands in the SOA era.

He talks about things missing (like binary file features and lots of security features). He also notes something that most PHP developers love about the extension - the WSDL parsing that makes it so easy to simply call a remote service without having to go through the pain of hacking through it yourself.

In this new post on the Northclick blog, Soenke talks about the stream wrappers included in PHP and some of the magic that can happen when they're applied correctly. In this case, it's an application of the ssh2 library (by Sara Golemon).

The new system must be very stable with a strict error checking and has to support several ways of file transports (FTP, SCP/SFTP). SCP is faster then FTP and secure by nature. It's going to be the standard way for deployment.

After finding and loading the extension, things flowed along swimmingly - the code shows a simple transfer method of transfer over a secure ftp connection, complete with a few performance stats at the end.