I am stepping down from being the lead of AMFPHP as of January 2010 and passing the torch to Ariel Sommeria and Danny Kopping. The goal of AMFPHP was as follows:
Quick installation and implementation
Nothing required – PHP4/PHP5 compatible, no extensions needed
Low footprint, lightweight, fast
Convention over configuration (service and class mapping)
Can be embedded into a framework (see CakeAmfphp , Seagull )
Services are “non-specific” PHP classes that are portable to anything without code change
Productivity tools included (service browser, code gen, profiling)
Batteries included – XML-RPC, JSON
Not a framework by itself (use your own)
Examples
Mimic the AMF specification
When I started AMFPHP I was using Flash 8 to build RIA’s; boy the world has changed! I honestly can say I don’t personally agree with the goal of AMFPHP anymore. A week ago Patrick Mineault called me out on my motivation; he was right. I have since migrated to using Flex and even had the amazing opportunity to work on Flash Builder 4’s PHP integration. Overall my mission has changed and with it I tried to change AMFPHP. Sorry everyone; I didn’t even notice I was doing that! Overall I am probably much better at slinging PHP code than moderating a project. With that in mind I will still be committing updates and answering questions for both projects.
Flex Builder 4, Security (Zend_ACL), Robust Logging, Robust Authentication (Zend_Auth), ORM and Master/Slave DB’s (Zend_DB), Messaging (AMQP), 5.3 Naming Conventions, clean New BSD license, decoupled serialize, OOP code base, and a massive service catalog are why I will continue to work on Zend Amf. I believe that Zend Amf is a great solution for anyone looking to build RIA’s in PHP.
I’m sure AMFPHP and Zend AMF is dealing with a larger problem that Adobe is dealing with. How do we keep those that are getting started and need a quick solution and those that need enterprise architecture all happy under the same name; Flash. I wish Danny and Ariel the best of luck and will give them my full support with questions and introductions to the community at large! They have already released an updated patch available for download today!
Lots of changes made to Zend Amf made there way into Zend Frameworks next mini release for 1.8.4. I thought that I would run through the major changes. Special thanks to Stefan Klug for all of the patches that he produced! Absolutely grateful sir! This is probably the biggest update to the system since the first release. Please make sure that you test 1.8.4 before you push it into your production environment. Why? Well if your like me you probably built a couple work arounds for some of these bugs. Those work arounds may no longer work once the bug is fixed!
Major Changes
ZF-6641 Shared references are duplicated ZF-6205 Serializer does not support cyclic references ZF-6393 Wrong Amf0_Amf3 reference counting ZF-5382 Multiple calls seems to break the deserializer. ZF-6625 Zend Amf can load any instantiated PHP class. Security
Minor but significant changes
ZF-6975 Adobe Flash Builder 4 wizard now supports data types for introspection. ZF-6992 Negative integers on 64 bit system is resolved. ZF-6775 Unable to send Array’s from Blaze DS.
The 1.8.4 release has already been tagged and should come out sometime today 6/23/2009
Mihai Corlan and Adobe Platform evangelist put together a nice video on debugging Flex and PHP projects with Flex Builder and Zend Studio and posted on Adobe TV. Check it out as it is pretty darn slick!
I have been cleaning up some code and test cases in Zend Amf before some more real development starts. If you had issues with class and method collision, ByteArray’s, array’s loosing there keys, documents, or not getting the errors that you wanted please check out the latest build. Also if you have any feature request or bugs please make sure you let me know!
Next up is optimizing ArrayCollection and proxy object support.
If you used returning native resources in AMFPHP can you please let me know which ones.
One of the most impressive features of Flash remoting is the ease at which you can send back resultsets. AMFPHP is preloaded with a set of adapters for a variety of databases and database drivers, in particular:
Support has been added to Zend Amf to return php objects of type DOMDocument and SimpleXML and receive an XML object in Flex ready for E4X. Note that you can already send an XML object from the flash player that results in a SimpleXML object in PHP.
Here is an example of the PHP service.
ab';
$this->doc = new DOMDocument();
$this->doc->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$this->doc->loadXML($sXML);
}
public function getDom()
{
return $this->doc;
}
public function getSimpleXml()
{
$simpleXml = simplexml_import_dom($this->doc);
return $simpleXml;
}
}
If you just received a copy of Flex 4 Gumbo like me you may have some issues getting something simple started. The following code shows how to make a simple remoteobject call inside flex builder 4. A couple gotchas that fooled me. First notice that you have to wrap your remoteobject call inside of the new declarations tag. Second you should notice that the MX namespace has been dropped for all components. This too took me a bit!
The Zend Framework 1.7 was released Monday just in time for the buzz to hit Adobe Max. The following are cool things that I experienced with the project at MAX 08!
Tim Buntel gave the Keynote on the second day of Adobe MAX and mentioned the Zend Amf in the keynote. This was pretty cool!
The Zend booth seemed to have a lot of traffic and if there is anyway i can get a copy of this sign i want to hang it in my office.
The Adobe Booth had these flyers laying around that talked about the integration.
Garth Braithwaite gave a presentation at 360|MAX about using Zend Amf in an application. Sorry garth we are not going to change the name the ZAMF.
James Ward and I had a little chat without cowboy hats! He was looking pretty metro sexual for being the RIA cowboy! We are going to try and get census updated to compare Zend Amf vs java. Ohh that’s going to trigger some work on AMFEXT!
The Zend Framework website updated announcing the 1.7 release and I love the Adobe advertisement!
I also got to talk with the Flex Builder team about getting better integration of PHP data services into Flex. I hope those talks go somewhere!
Super excited that the new 1.7 release of the Zend Framework is into production. It has been a pleasure to be a part of this team. The guys at Zend are A+ programmers and I have learned a lot by being able to share this experience. I have never been on a group that had as high of expectations for the completness of their code and this is why the framework is so solid. Thanks Wil, Stas, Matthew, and Adobe for a chance to work with such a fantastic group!
With that in mind I will still be committing updates and answering questions for both projects.
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