Andi Gutmans has pointed out an effort that Adobe has proposed that would go a long way towards adding AMF support to the Zend Framework.

This ZF component will allow for client-side applications built with Flex and Adobe AIR to communicate easily and efficiently with PHP on the server-side. Leading the design of the component for Adobe is Wade Arnold. Wade already has a track record of bringing the Adobe RIA technologies to PHP as a result of all of his work on AMFPHP.

Andi sees this as a next logical step to helping the framework become more "Enterprise oriented" and to compliment the recent Dojo integration. The plan is to release it with the 1.7 version of the framework, but the actual timing may vary due to the approval process.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new tutorial (by Jack Herrington) talking about working with Adobe AIR and Javascript to make a desktop application for uploading images (or any other files) to a remote server.

To solve the upload problem, most of the big services have dedicated upload applications that run on all the different platforms. But it takes a lot of work to develop them, especially when they have to run on both Macintosh and Windows. Or is it so tough? As it turns out, Adobe AIR technology makes it possible to write applications for any platform using just HTML and JavaScript. It also offers access to cool desktop features, notably drag and drop.

The tutorial shows how to make the application with the HTML/Javascript version of an AIR app (as opposed to Flex) that lets you drag and drop files into it to be uploaded. They make the basic file upload form first as a foundation then extend it to make it accept the remote request (via POST) from the AIR application to handle the uploads. Javascript code and screenshots are included.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new article/tutorial showing how to keep things in sync on your Drupal installation with the help of Adobe AIR.

Whether you're an enterprise developer working in a large shop or setting up a blog for yourself, you've almost certainly been tasked with keeping your development code in sync with some type of stable release. Whether a project is big or small, you still need to ensure that the core code you work with remains consistent.

The tutorial walks you through the setup of a basic AIR application, how to pull the configuration XML into it and parsing it to use in the interface. The next step is the sync, grabbing your config and pushing it out to other multiple configs across your sites (via a REST service).