DevShed has posted a new tutorial for two tools that could be used to bridge the gap between rich internet applications and powerful backend technology - Adobe Flex and PHP.
The development of Rich Internet Applications is now underway. Some people are calling this "Web 2.0," but it is really the transition from a page based browsing experience to one that more closely resembles desktop applications. A variety of technologies can be used to deliver this experience; AJAX is currently one of the more popular sets of technologies, mainly because it can be easily adapted into existing web based applications.
However, for those who are looking for something more robust, there appears to be two early front runners: Flex based applications that run in the Flash player from Adobe, and XML based applications from Microsoft. In this article, I'll introduce you to Adobe's Flex product line, including Adobe Flex Builder and Adobe Flex Enterprise Services.
They step you through all the steps you'll need to connect these two, including pointers to the tools and some sample code to get things working. The PHP script pulls the data from a database and formats the result in the MXML data layout to make it workable in the Flex environment.
