Flex 2 and PHP

Last week I walked through Mike Potter’s article on Integrating Flex 2 and PHP. I created the sample database on my Linux server. I created a simple form in Flex 2. I used Mike’s sample PHP script to write the new entries to the database. It was pretty simple. I also merged the PHP script with another script I have that sends an e-mail message with the data from the same form. It was a peice of cake.

It got a little complicated when I found out that the XML coming from the form I would be tying this into would not be a  flat structure with only key value pairs.  The developer building the form suggested that I install Zend.

Zend is not a bad platform if you are serious about using PHP.  I also found another good article about using JSON as your communication layer between Flex and PHP.  I will add both of these under my Flex Articles section.

You may also want to look under my Flex Resources section, where I will add a few links with good resources about PHP and Flex.

What I Got From Attending 360Flex

I didn’t find out about 360Flex until about a week or so before the Conference.

It was VERY much worth the $360 for the 3-day conference.  This was only the 2nd year for this conference.  I thought that they did a pretty decent job.  There were a lot of great sessions from very talented people.

There were several sessions that I missed because I signed up to be a part of the Northwest Charity Flex Jam. Eddie Herrmann posted a little bit about this in his introspectiveH blob.

I learned a lot more being a part of this great team than I would have learned if I attended all of the sessions.  (The sessions were all recorded and should be available shortly.)

On my first day of the conference, I met Roberto Rodriguez before going into my first session.  Little did I know, Roberto is a coding maniac!  I have TOTAL respect for this genious of a developer. Ali posted a photo of us out on Flickr.

Merritt Chapman, the guy coding in the grey shirt on the right next to Roberto, was rewarded the XBox and definitely deserved it!  He wrote most of the CFCs and gave us all a lot of valuable ColdFusion training.

It wasn’t until two days into the Code Jam, I realized that I was working next to the some of the guys that wrote the books about Flex that I’ve been reading. Jeff Tapper, the guy in the red shirt, and Mike Labriola were a couple of the authors of “Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source”. I’m sure I’ll find out later that they wrote a lot of other books and that there were more authors there that I didn’t know about.

I wish I knew all the names of the mentors that coached us along, so I could give them all credit.  If anyone has more information about these guys, feel free to comment.

Ted Patrick from Adobe also paid us a visit.  I had already linked in one of Ted’s articles, but I didn’t know what a big name he has in the Flex community.

Ali Daniali led the team and did an awesome job.  I owe a lot to Ali, as well as to the other great minds on this project.

 If you didn’t go to 360Flex, you missed out on a great conference!

If you went to 360Flex, but you didn’t join the Flex Code Jam, you missed out on a great opportunity!  I highly recommend looking for other opportunities to join Open Source projects in the future.

Skinning Your Flex App

I’m just getting started on skinning, but I found several good sites and articles that cover this subject.  I am adding the links under Flex Articles and Flex Resources.  Next week I will be attending the 360Flex conference in Seattle.  After attending the conference, I plan to write an article that simplifies the skinning process. Check back here in a couple of weeks to see what we have.

Quote Calculator in Flex

Tonight I finally finished a quote calculator using Flex Builder 3.

The project took a little longer than I had hoped, but it was a lot of fun.

At some point I plan to publish the guts of the wizard.  There are some tutorials out there that use the TabNavigator, but I didn’t find any that had buttons to help you navigate through the wizard pages.

Why Another Blog on Flex?

There are blogs popping up all over the place.  And there is information everywhere you look on any topic you want.

My main goal in creating this blog is to cram all of the information that I learn about Flex into one website.  Over the next few months, I will be adding a ton of links to websites and other blogs, articles, and tutorials that I think are useful to someone who is trying to come up to speed on one of the best programming languages or tools out there.

I will start out adding my links under my Flex Resources, Flex Articles, and Flex Tutorial categories. I’ll add more categories as the need arises.  Today I am adding a couple of links.  One to a great article that helped me overcome some confusion.  For some reason, I always thought that Flex had to be installed on a web server like Tomcat, or JRun, or JBoss.  Apparently, it doesn’t.  At least not anymore.  Check out Ted’s Top 10 Myths About Adobe Flex 2.0.

The next is a great article (one of the best articles I’ve ever read) by Christophe Coenraets, called Providing a Flex Front End to Your Struts Applications. 

What about Flex?

Of all of the programming languages I’ve ever used so far, Flex is definitely my favorite.

Why do I like Flex so much?  I seriously do believe that it is the wave of the future.  Yes, there are some issues that will have to be resolved down the road.  At the same time I have been digging into Flex, I have also been studying Search Engine Optimization.  For obvious reasons, I would not build a whole site using Flex, unless I had plenty of other high ranking sites pointing to the Flex site.  (Web crawlers have a hard time reading .swf files.)

It is my prediction that within a few short years, everybody will be wanting to use Flex to build sites to attract more customers and to close more online sales.

Why Flex?  

Here’s my list (and feel free to add your own):

• Flex is easy
• Flex is fun to use.
• Flex is attractive.
• Flex can make a website look and act like a desktop application.
• Flex has great video capabilities.
• Flex has easy charting capabilities.
• Using Flex to read XML is a peice of cake.
• You can use Flex to read and write to databases.
• Flex lends itself well to the e-Commerce space.
• You can use Flex to call PHP.
• You can use Flex to call ActionScript.
• You can use Flex to call JavaScript.
• Building Flex applications that run on ColdFusion isn’t bad at all.
• Flex can be used inside of an already built Tomcat application. (JSP)
• Flex can do socket communication.
• It won’t be long before you will not be able to win sales online unless your web applications can interact with the customer, or unless you can show them some pretty awesome video clips demonstrating your product.

Why not Flex?  

Again, feel free to add your own comments.

• Flex is not easy for the search engines to crawl–although there are some work-arounds for this.
• Memory and time for pages to load.  However, Flex 3 is supposed to be a lot faster, and less of a memory hog.

In my opinion, if you are trying to sell something, and you want to attract and keep customers and persuade customers to buy your products and services, the pros outweigh the cons.

Feel free to add your two cents.