12 May
Where Are The Good Development Tools For PHP, Part II
Thanks to everyone for the great comments to my previous post on this topic. I think I may have found the answer to what I was looking for. Cal Evans over at the Zend Developer Zone gave me a heads-up that he would be posting a tutorial on using Flex and PHP. I believe my exact words to him after about 10 minutes of playing with it was “this is FUCKING cool!”. Which it definitely is.
Flash at the front, and PHP at the back I think is the sweet spot for me. I followed his tutorial (which was very well done, kudos to you Cal) and in under ten minutes from having FlexBuilder installed (30 day trial, but FlexBuilder is really expensive at US$499) I had a very simple Flex app that was talking to my Zend Framework-powered PHP application. I built a very simple playlist editor where I could add and remove items from the playlist. In invested a grand total of 30 minutes in playing with it. Big props to Adobe for creating such a cool tool for “rich internet applications”. I was hoping I could catch Mike Potter’s talk at php|tek but I don’t know if I’ll make it in time. My flight is supposed to touch down at 11:00AM in Chicago and the talk is at 11:30…only a miracle would get me there in time.
I’m thinking of seeing if I can build a media upload app using Flex on Monday for the supersecret IPTV project I’ve been working on since I started at Syneron. Think I can do it? Cal tells me that there are some open source tools out there for doing Flex work so maybe I won’t have to buy it. 
Hey Mike Potter, can’t you help a developer out and get me a free copy of Flex Builder? Check out the Flex web site to see what might be the next wave of internet applications. Flash is pretty much the only cross-browser technology that always works the same. Or so I’ve been led to believe.
Posted by Tarique Sani on 12.05.07 at 7:03 pm
http://www.openlaszlo.org/ ? may not be the same but it is free and can free you from being dependent on Flash…
Posted by pdaether on 12.05.07 at 7:03 pm
You should try CakePHP with CakeAMFPHP (connects AMFPHP to the Cake framework).
I just build an project on top of this and it works great together.
Posted by Brian D. on 12.05.07 at 7:03 pm
Unfortunately, that’s not always true. I have seen some websites developed in Flash that did not work the same when viewed on Linux (specifically, Ubuntu). I’m not sure if it was shoddy development techniques, a different rendering method, or what, but some web sites (this is an example) fail to render properly outside of Windows.
Posted by PHPDeveloper.org on 12.05.07 at 7:03 pm
Chris Hartjes’ Blog: Where Are The Good Development Tools For PHP, Part II…
…
Posted by Aaron Heimlich on 12.05.07 at 7:03 pm
Just wanted to clear up something:
Flex Builder is US$499.
Flex Builder with the charting components is US$799.
see http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/productinfo/buy/
Posted by Chris Hartjes on 12.05.07 at 7:03 pm
@Aaron - thanks for pointing that out, I’ll edit the post to reflect that.
Posted by Mike Potter on 12.05.07 at 7:03 pm
Not sure if you managed to make it to my talk, but if you missed it you didn’t miss much. My hard drive crashed 3 slides into the presentation.
I’m hoping to do an online Acrobat Connect session soon instead.
You can find similar slides from my blog at http://www.riapedia.com/
Mike
P.S. We aren’t giving away copies of Flex Builder, but if you add a Flex book to Amazon’s Wish List, you never know what will happen… http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=731
Posted by Chris Hartjes on 12.05.07 at 7:03 pm
@Mike — Yeah, I heard about the disaster…and I added the book to my wish list.
Posted by Chris Hartjes on 12.05.07 at 7:03 pm
D’oh: Can’t beg for books if I don’t put my wishlist up: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/2ZNT96VNHBEQ2/ref=lst_llp_wl-go/002-0032296-5685600