Wade Arnold » AMFPHP

Passing the AMFPHP torch

wadearnold — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:32:21 +0000

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!

Major Zend Amf updates for 1.8.4 release

wadearnold — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:34:01 +0000

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

Adobe TV segment: Debug Flex and PHP projects

wadearnold — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:41:27 +0000

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!

Zend AMF updates and questions for AMFPHP users

wadearnold — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:18:19 +0000

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!

Zend Framework Issue Tracker for AMF

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:

MySQL
PostgreSQL
SQLite
MySQLi
MsSQL
ADODB
ODBC
Oracle (oci8 for PHP5)
PDO
PEAR::DB

Additional XML support in Zend Amf

wadearnold — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:54:57 +0000

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;
    }
}

Simple RemoteObject example in Flex 4 Gumbo

wadearnold — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 05:05:37 +0000

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!

Check out the ScreenCast and of course the code