how to develop a simple Flex application Posted by R@hUl | at 8:57 AM

I’d like to thank the following people for their help with software that I’ve used in this tutorial, and for helping me with some questions I had getting started. If you’re interested in using PHP and Flex or Flash, then you should check out their blogs.Patrick Mineault – http://www.5etdemi.com/blog/Jesse Warden – http://www.jessewarden.com/ http://www.tweenpix.net/blog – A blog in French where I got the Action Script code for Remoting Connection from (http://www.tweenpix.net/blog/index.php?2006/01/03/543- hello-world-en-amfphp-avec-flex20) In the last article, I showed you how to develop a simple Flex application that connected to a PHP backend. As you were going through it, you were probably thinking “Is there anyway to pass variables directly from PHP, rather than having to encode them intoXML?” The answer is yes, and today I’m going to show you how to do that.If you’re looking to build a medium to large scale enterprise application, you should check out Adobe Flex Data Services at http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/flexenterprise_services2/. That will simplify the data interaction by adding high performance data transfer, message based publish and subscribe and more. AMFPHP only provides a small subset of what is possible with FlexEnterprise Services. If you’re a large company, then you’ll want to look at FDS for yourdata interaction layer.The key to doing this is a small project called AMFPHP. As stated on their webpage, theproject was originally started by Wolfgang Hamann. The team has grown lately, and now has about 5 or 6 developers. Thanks to their hard work, we can now have a Flexbased front end to our PHP back end applications.If you haven’t done so already, download the Flex Beta from the Adobe Labs website at http://labs.adobe.com. Then, download AMFPHP v. 1.1 from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=72483 Follow the instructions to deploy it.Now would probably be a good time to read over the first article that I wrote, if you haven’t done so already. Check it out at http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/11 The sample that we’re creating today will show us how to use Flex to display records from a database. We will not be inserting or updating any records, only showing them tothe user. We’ll use a similar database to the first example, so if you’ve got a database and table created from that example, then use that. Otherwise, create the following MySQL table: CREATE TABLE `users` (`userid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,`username` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,`email address` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,PRIMARY KEY (`userid`)) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_ciAUTO_INCREMENT=3 ;

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