Adobe has made a proposal for an AMF (Action Message Format) component in 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.
We are excited about this proposal as it is consistent with our emphasis to be a heterogeneous “use-at-will” framework and as it substantially strengthens Zend Framework’s RIA story. It is also another industry heavyweight joining as an official ZF contributor and joining the likes of IBM, Google and Microsoft in doing so.
Now that we have the Dojo integration ready for ZF 1.6 as a great Ajax story, AMF will complement that with more of an Enterprise oriented solution. We are currently planning to have AMF support aligned with the ZF 1.7 release but we will know better once the proposal has made it through the proposal process. Adobe’s software has some significant strengths including WYSIWYG tooling with their Flex Builder product, multimedia support and a way to bridge Web technologies to the desktop with Adobe AIR. With this integration Zend Framework users will enjoy the best of both worlds: Dojo as a broadly adopted open-standards Ajax solution supported by literally all popular browsers and operating systems and Adobe’s RIA solutions which are the most ubiquitous commercially driven RIA technologies. And best of all, Dojo and Adobe have actually worked together to make sure that Dojo runs well in Adobe AIR (http://dojotoolkit.org/air) so we see these technologies can also work nicely together.
Adobe, welcome to the Zend Framework family… We are glad to have you on board.
