Given that Zend has had a professional relationship with Adobe for a while, I have been looking for the time to actually dive into what Flash was offering so I could make some kind of judgment call on it. [...] With that in mind, I would like to talk about some introductory topics on what it would take to get a basic Flash/Flex application up and running. This will be part 1 of an X part series. I don't know how many parts there will be, but I would expect that there would be a few.

He walks you through the full process of using Flash Builder 4 (a 60 day free trial is available) and Zend Studio/Eclipse PDT to set up a native environment for rapid development of Flex apps. He creates the basic "Hello World" app, showing how to connect PHP to the Flex application and a bit of additional work to get it to cooperate with a MVCed Zend Framework application too.

In this article I will explain how to build a simple adobe flex application that communicates with php using remote objects calls to the new AMF php implementation supported by adobe and called ZendAMF. In my example I will use Adobe Flex Builder 3, ZendAMF and a Apache web server with php support and mysql server on windows. If you do not have any available server with php (at least) you will need to install one on your machine. It's easy, nowadays you have many standalone installers that do everything, just look at the wampserver for example.

If you want to get started right away, you can download the source and get going. Otherwise, you can check out the rest of the tutorial to see how they build up their example. They show how to create the project, set up the Zend_Amf extension's configuration and creating the simple application that echos back a "hello world" sort of response based on a text field's entry.

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The tutorial looks at creating a first application with a Flex front end and a PHP backend - a script that accesses an API that returns either an XML or JSON formatted message.

In this upcoming version [of Flex Builder], 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.

The group would get a sneak peek at the upcoming features, work with the development team and help to make the product into something the community really can use. If you'd like to get in on the program, fill out this survey and they'll get in touch with you with more information.

With all the hype (and money) surrounding buzzword terms like Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications (RIA), it's easy to wonder, "How can I integrate that into my PHP application?" Certainly, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) technologies that use JavaScript code are a good option. But you should also have a look at the Adobe Flex framework. With Flex, you can quickly build functional, attractive user interfaces in Adobe Flash that communicate to your PHP web application through XML.

They go through the usual of showing what Flex is and how it flows in a web application. From there, they move into the tutorial portion - installing the Flex Builder software, creating a new project, testing using Flex Builder and the construction of a sample application (store/access a list of subscribers).

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.

He talks about what he needed to get started and how his first experience with creating an application went - a simple app up and running (from install to a finished app) in about 30 minutes.

For more information on Adobe's Flex, check out their website at Flex.org.