Wade Arnold

From Andi Gutmans

Adobe is currently building the next generation of Flex Builder, the Eclipse based IDE for creating cross-platform rich Internet applications.  In this upcoming version, a significant new set of features are being introduced to accelerate creation of data-centric applications with PHP on the server-side leveraging Zend Framework and Zend AMF.  Prior to the public Beta later in the year, Adobe would like to invite a select group of PHP developers into a private pre-release program for Flex Builder. You’ll get to work with the new data-centric development features, interact with members of the product team, provide feedback, and generally help shape the future of the product.  No prior experience with Flex is necessary; in fact feedback from new users would be particularly helpful.  There is a brief survey here - please complete it and Adobe will send an invitation to you shortly.

Flash Platform, Zend_Amf

I have read a couple ranting emails, tweets, and blog posts about why Zend Amf does not have gzip compression; “Wade what a waste!” is my favorite one. The reality is that the AMF protocol does not have gzip compression, there is no DEFLATE call, and if you read the protocol you can find no mention of such a thing. When AMFPHP added AMF3 support it also added a php based gzip support in the same release. Hence AMFPHP now with AMF3 and Gzip compression; mutually exclusive rumor started. The compression of HTTP which is the envelop that that AMF data is transported through does not mean that AMF is compressed. This is no different than the plethora of other http service end points such as Soap, JSON, REST, XMLRPC, etc which all benefit from a properly configured web server. 

If you run apache check out mod_deflate.  With this approach, you tell the server what content types should be compressed, and the server does it transparently to your application. Apache is a heck of a lot faster at doing the compression than adding PHP code that uses gzcompress.

Hope this helps… and please no dirty names for someone that’s just trying to give you some free code. Go get Live Cycle DS dude!

Flash Platform, Zend_Amf

Friday, April 3, 2009 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT

Signup!
A three part series on how PHP developers can develop applications with the Adobe Flash Platform.  Lee Brimelow, a technical evangelist for Adobe, will go over the pieces of the Flash Platform and how PHP developers can use technologies like Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR in combination with PHP to build rich applications that work consistently across browsers in Flash Player and on the desktop using Adobe AIR.

Flash Platform, Zend_Amf

I am really excited to be showcasing Zend Framework and the work that I have been doing on Zend Amf, maybe some FB 4 sneaks, at SWFCAMP Monday the 6th in Minneapolis. There are great speakers lined up for only $40 dollars of all day training. That’s pretty slick! This mini conference is run better than most major conference because people like Danny Patterson and Dave Shroeder, FlashBelt, make sure it is executed flawlessly. The cool thing about the day is that all of the speakers will be adding onto the same project throughout the entire day. This means that we get to cover a larger application than normal. Little will be repeated and the individual speakers get to focus on their specific topic. It should be lots of fun. Last year we had a turn out well over 100 people, great facility, and the sushi and drinks for the after party were fantastic! If you have ever attended a Flash Camp before this is the next level. 

More about the application we are building:

Jason Grey is building an product comparison application where the user can add products from Amazon or eBay and compare them.  Danny Paterson is  going to be adding peer-to-peer collaboration to the application in his session.  This will allow two users to shop and compare together. To do peer-to-peer in Flash Player 10 we must use the new Stratus beta from Adobe to get unique ids.  These ids need to be registered along with the user’s name in a common place.  So the service we need is a backend that can store current user sessions. Enter Wade Arnold’s talk on using ZendAmf for integration with PHP and MySQL.

This will be fun! I am sure there are more details but you will just have to come in order to find them all out! Check out the main site for more infomation and sign up right now!

 http://www.mnswf.org/camp/index.cfm

Flash Platform, Speaking, Zend_Amf

Make sure that you go update your zendamf library to the latest 1.7.8 mini release. Lots of bug fixes and changes that will be required for the next mini release . 

Download

Change log

Flash Platform, Zend_Amf

Lot’s of bug fixes have been added to the next release of the zend framework. I have listed all of the jira tickets below. A lot of these issues have been fixed in the trunk for months but have not made it to a mini release because i didn’t know that I was suppose to merge them! Now I know and this mini release is going to be very significant. Please update when it is released so you can help me find any other issues. 

Monday the 30th we should see the 1.7.8 mini release of zend framework. 

ZF-5388 Zend_Amf_Server handles arguments wrong 

ZF-5831 Zend_Amf_Server getDirectory returns the wrong variable

ZF-5816 Wrongly capitalized class name in Zend_Amf_Request initialize method

ZF-5710 Multiple object with transient _explicitType loose are not type cast

ZF-5040 Impossible to set same method name in two differents services

ZF-5393 Error when passing Zend_Amf_Server::setClass() an object instead of a string

ZF-5346 AMF3 Messages with Object as first param fails with badVersion

ZF-5381 Create session management of subsequent AMF calls.

ZF-5707 Using addDirectory does not enforce names spaces

Flash Platform, Zend_Amf

Robert Taylor an OFG (Original Flash Gangster) and long term industry friend of mine wrote an interesting article on using the Zend Amf serialize to send back variables to Flash and Flex. I can honestly say that I would have NEVER though of using the serialize this way but it frankly is brilliant. What a super slick way to get typed data back into the Flash Player. Check out Serializing Flash Objects over HTTP

Flash Platform, Zend_Amf

Piotr Walczyszyn and Adobe Platform evangelist just released ZendAmfD  as an extension to Zend_Amf (it actually extends Zend_Amf_Server class). It allows developers to configure and execute on the server side database queries against model classes that extend Zend_Db_Table_Abstract. It is really exciting for me to see others contributing to the project. Please check it out and maybe this is something that we will add to the Zend Amf trunk?

Flash Platform, Zend_Amf

The the 1.8 release of Zend Framework right around the corner I am trying hard to get any blocking issues resolved. If you are having any issues with Zend Amf please open up a bug or vote on any existing issues that are keeping you from adopting the framework. Also pull the latest version from SVN if you can to insure it has not been resolved in the last two weeks. 

Zend Framework Issue Tracker

Thanks!

Flash Platform, Zend_Amf

Use the Gaia Flash Framework? Then you know how important a valid site.xml file is to loading assets, pages, and the entire scaffolding process. In a shout out to Steven Sacks and the amazing work that he has been doing in order to release Gaia 3.0 Jeremiah Philipp who works for me at T8DESIGN put together an amazing little application to quickly update you site.xml and visualize it. We will be working with Steven over the next couple days to get this over into the gaia project source base. If you have ideas please share them!

• xml validation
• drag and drop re-ordering
• duplicate entire branches
• reorder assets for load order
• pages templates
• edit project properties
• print site map
• import site.xml
• file browser to find assets

Try it out people! 

Gaia Framework site.xml creator

Flash Platform, Gaia Framework