At ZendCon this year we announced a partnership between Zend and Adobe. The goal of the partnership is to help make it easier for PHP developers to use Flex. Since then there has been a flurry of activity including blog posts and the introduction of Zend_Amf into the main trunk of Zend Framework.
To help get PHP and Zend Framework developers up and running quickly, Kevin Hoyt has created a set of examples of using the new Zend_Amf component and posted them on his blog, in a post titled Lots of Flash, Flex, and Zend, PHP Samples.
"Depending on how you count it, there are somewhere between 13 and 54 different Flash, and/or Flex examples included in the attached archive - that doesn’t even count the different PHP examples (also included)."
Kevin's examples cover:
- Hello AMF
- Hello Text
- Hello XML
- Inline
- Object
- Remoting
- REST
It's a post that really gives PHP developers a good starting point and some excellent examples to work from. If you are interested in experimenting with Flex and PHP, you really need to read his post and explore his examples.
To be able to use the examples, you will need a version of Zend Framework that includes Zend_Amf.
Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Software Architect for Zend Framework, recommends checking out the latest version of Zend_Amf from SVN until 1.7 is officially released.
So make sure you grab the latest version from svn or get the final version of Zend Framework 1.7 when it comes out.
For further research on using Adobe Flex and Zend_Amf:
- Lee Brimlow and Matthew Weier O'Phinney's recently presented a webinar titled Using Zend Framework with Flex. (Free registration required)
- RIAFox.com has a manual page for Zend_Amf.
- Wade Arnold, the author of Zend_Amf, has several good blog posts on his blog covering Flex and Zend_AMF.
As usual, although I strongly :) recommend using ZF for all your PHP programming, if you just want AMF support for PHP--consistent with the Zend Framework 'use at will' architecture--you can use Zend_Amf standalone without using other parts of Zend Framework.
