Flash Remoting with PHP
It was about time. Finally the first steps are made to use parts of the Flash Remoting functionalities also in PHP. It looks like a guy called Musicman has reverse engineered the Actionscript Message Format (short AMF) which is the binary format in which actionscript objects are packaged on the way from and to the server.
Of course this discovery has already created quite an echo. There is a forum dedicated to the issue on flash-db.com and a sourceforge project called amfphp has been started to bundle the research and development activities.
Remains the question what Macromedia thinks about all that. My guess is that they won't be too happy about it. At least they must have had their reasons not to release the AMF specs. And one of them is probably that you cannot earn money with PHP.
[Via Daniel Dura]
Posted at January 31, 2003 05:52 PM | Further reading
i built a version of remoting for php that doesnt use any of macromedia existing as or remoting code. i use wddx & my own AS class for it, hence macromedia shouldnt have any problem with it... id say try both out and see which you prefer....
http://nuthing.com/flashconnect/
nik
this is simply genial, this is definetly something I and many others have been waiting for.
I think it would have been easy for MM to make a C extension (like php turbine or ming ) for php and also to make money on this.
I guess many more flash website are running on php servers than on ColdFusion, Java or .NET.
I think MM needs to sell ColdFusion.
This is a real big step to RAD for flash and the community.
Overall, I think this was unavoidable. However, I will be very interested in seeing how Macromedia handles this. It is certainly a case of reverse engineering, but to pursue it would be a waste of time and resources.
My proposal to all Commercial software systems is to try to stay ahead and move forward. For MM to spend much time working to cover their tracks on this and bury it deeper, or send out the law firms is not only a waste of time, but more importantly a waste of resources.
I am a fan for the most part of the work Macromedia has done and they do deserve to benefit from it, and are. I look forward to more innovation on both sides, as even though we can see that they "cracked the egg", the difference is that these guys may show MM a thing or two which of course MM can make use of for free. In this game of software development the game is innovation.
Innovate on, move forward and let everyone else follow in your foot steps.
My 2 cents and I look forward to seeing both projects move forward.
Jason Key
I just tried this out, and its great. I looked around for a long time, and tried Nik's solution, but I much prefer Musicman's (no offense nik). I found the wddx solution to be a kludge and a little slower. I still dont understand why MM didn't include support for PHP or atleast acknowledge it from the beginning. Hopefully this will be a consideration in the next release and we wont have to keep "hacking" it to make it work.
Kudos though to Nik and musicman...
Macromedia is actually quite happy about this. I've seen posts from some of the MM Remoting Developers in various corners and blogs stating that they are glad that people are showing interest. It also gives more reason for people to buy Flash, you see ;).
Although I think that amfphp would be better off as a C extension to the PHP language.... :-) Perhaps I'll do some work on that.
I also have to disagree about Macromedia "staying ahead and covering tracks..." -- they've been quite open with releasing the white papers to the SWF format; releasing the source of their player and other various products of theirs; providing (limited) support for the source and in general, being a good software publisher. I'm not working for MM or anything; I just don't think that MM needs to be portrayed as a Mini-MS.
Devon O'Dell
PHP/Flash Remote Method Invocation solution.
