Well here it is, back again after many years I have decided its time to make a new blog on this domain. I have to say WordPress looks like it has come a long way since the last time I tried it out everything is far more automated and streamlined.
Anyway, a couple of months ago I started a new job where I develop an application using Adobe’s Flex 4 SDK for a pretty front end for the client and a PHP and MySQL server.
Sadly using a PHP back end for a Flex client is still fairly new, there are several options available to anyone who is looking at using PHP for the server environment for a Flex application. The most common ways are XML (SOAP) and JSON which are both natively supported by PHP as well as AMF which has a number of implementations developed in PHP.
We using Action Message Format (AMF) because it is the format that is supported natively by the Flex SDK, and also supports type-casting of objects so we can create Value Objects (VOs) to store complex data structures in an object which has corresponding classes in both the back and front ends of the application which automatic get populated with data when as it moves backwards and forwards between the client and server.
I have been developing in PHP for many years now and know it know it intimately where as I still have a lot to learn in ActionScript and Flex SDK. In this blog I hope to write about the problems and pitfalls that I come across, maybe I will get lucky and be able to post the solutions I come up with as well.