Kevin Hoyt

Last week Adobe and Zend made a couple of really great announcements. The first was official addition of AMF (remoting) to the Zend Framework via Zend AMF. If you’re an AMFPHP fan, you’ll be happy to hear that Wade Arnold is heavily involved in this project. The other announcement was the two companies working together to have Flex Builder run inside Zend Studio. We still have some QE work to do here, but this promises a seamless workflow for rich client developers.

Lee Brimelow and myself were on hand for most of the Zend Conference in Santa Clara, CA, and spent a substantial amount of time in the exhibit hall answering questions about Adobe, Flex and AMF, and what they have to do with PHP. Probably the most common question was simply “what is Flex?” I think everybody has their way of describing Flex in a very succinct manner, but for Lee it was “Flash for developers” and for me it was “PowerBuilder for the web.” It all depends on the background of the person that’s asking of course (and answering), but that’s generally enough to lay the foundations for a more elaborate explanation and discussion.

While at the conference, I tried to attend a few sessions. The booth traffic was enough though that getting out of the exhibit hall proved challenging at times. Since the exhibits closed up on Wednesday night, but there was still more conference on Thursday, I decided that’d be my first, best, and potentially only chance to sit in on a session. As luck would have it, the first session I ran across was one by Ed Finkler entitled “Building Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML, & JavaScript in AIR.” I’m pretty sure he was going for a title that completely filled the first slide.

Although I was unable to attend, I do know that Ed also presented other topics including another one that included Adobe AIR at the Zend un-conference. If you’re not familiar with Ed, he has an application called Spaz, built on Adobe AIR. Spaz is an award-winning Twitter client written using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. It has been a real treat to watch it evolve since AIR has been available.

I really like that during Ed’s session at Zend Con that he repeatedly emphasized AIR’s focus on security, and how developers and framework teams should stop using dangerous practices such as reliance on the eval() method. Ed’s tie back into PHP here was that “PHP is your server-side buddy” with a picture of Jay and Silent Bob. Showing off a new, and somewhat controversial application, Ed talked about how the Flash APIs in AIR can give you some image manipulation abilities. Since Ed doesn’t know Flash however, he sends images to PHP to be manipulated. That’s a great point about AIR being built on web technologies - use what you know.

Ed has made his slides available, and I was also able to record the session audio.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 11:11 am and is filed under PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.