Rich Internet applications built with Adobe Flex and Flash Builder have been steadily gaining a foothold in enterprise development for quite some time. As the platform has grown and evolved, PHP has also made amazing progress toward becoming a mature, powerful object-oriented language with rapid adoption and dozens of frameworks and design pattern implementations. As PHP continues to prosper, developers are able to borrow more and more of the things Java has got right, taking one check after another from the “Java-only” column. One outstanding example of this is object-relational mapping (ORM). A few different PHP ORM implementations are available, and all of them have positive attributes. However, after some experimentation, I’ve found that Doctrine is my favorite. […]

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. […]

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! […]

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.

[…]

Stefan Schmalhaus has suggested an alternative approach for setting up a Zend Action Message Format (AMF) server. His approach makes it easy to add Flex and HTML interfaces to an application at a later date: "Many tutorials suggest that you set up the Zend AMF server directly in the bootstrap or index.php file. But what if you want to build a hybrid application with both Flex and HTML interfaces? In this case it's better to let the bootstrap file do its usual job of application dispatching, and to make the AMF gateway a controller. If you're interested in building AMF support into your application, Stefan's views on how to better organize your code will almost certainly be of interest. […]

Adobe’s technical evangelism team is packing up the bus and hitting the road to show PHP User Groups how cool Flex and PHP can be when used together. […]

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. […]

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. […]

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. […]