Let's face it: Interactive graphs and dashboards have never been easy to put together on the web. Sure, there are graphing libraries out there for PHP, but to get something that looks really good and that a user can play with has been tough. Or at least, it was yesterday.

He shows how to create a simple Flex application that takes in XML data (from whatever backend, he uses a PHP script that uses DOM) and displays the information - his sample traffic data - as a graph. This graph is an extension of the Elixir library from ILOG and makes dropping information into graphs and charts simple.

Screenshots of the Flex side of things and code for the PHP side are both provided.

They dive right in, throwing download links at you and working through setup steps to get your environment up and running. With that out of the way, they show how to get the demo set up that uses their weborb framework.

The end result of the article is a simple Flex/PHP application that pulls information from the database and pushes it into a datagraid for display.

Web services are the coolest technology I know of that ends up turning everyone off. I don't know about you, but when I go to a lecture on Web services, invariably tons of acronyms come out [...] and then I start to nod off and dream about a land where free Krispy Kreme donuts grow on trees.

He reframes the web services world away from the acronyms and strict standards to more towards using it as a method of communication between apps, letting them engage in some friendly conversation. He uses the rest of the tutorial showing how to create an RSS reader of sorts using dashes of PEAR, XML, C#, XSLT, Ajax and Flex.

Connecting to the service browser I was receiving the error "Channel.Ping.Failed" error and investingating a bit more in the fault message I discovered that the source error was: "The class {Amf3Broker} could not be found under the class path {/var/htdocs/amfphp/services/amfphp/Amf3Broker.php}" and the Amf3Broker php class does not exists anywhere in amfphp!

Despite some default settings he found, though, things still weren't loading correctly. Finally, he found the culprit - mbstring. One server had the setting to overload the strings and the other didn't resulting in the return of corrupted data from the amfphp stream.