Based on my previous post where I kind of promoted ASSQL, there are a few issues that I’ve encountered while testing the environment specifically when it comes to the new flash policy which has been pushed this April with Flash Player 9.0.124.
ASSQL bases it’s functionality on sockets to access the mysql client port 3306, the flash player sends a request to a socketserver which serves a policy file which is basically a crossdomain.xml with a little bit more information inside. Sadly the applications provided by Adobe and ASSQL are not ready to work out of the box, basically you need to write your own socketserver that serves the aproppriate Policy File, the PHP Daemon solution that is provided on the ASSQL page (http://ammonlauritzen.com/blog/2008/04/22/flash-policy-service-daemon/) is not an option as it needs certain php extensions that are not available on a windows system, apart from that (mt) doesn’t allow any kind of daemons running on their gridservice (gs). As the application that I’m creating is going to be hosted on (mt) for the first few months I had to leave the idea of working with ASSQL on this project. Which now turns me back to AMFPHP.
As said before using the ASSQL library isn’t an option anymore for me (altough I would like to see a proper implemented solution and a well formed documentation on this matter) my next option recommended by Dan aka. PolyGeek was the usage of AMFPHP which I already had a look at but somehow something kept me of dealing with it, anyway last night I promised my self to dive into it and try to wrap my head around it, I was so delighted about it, that I’m spending most of my time now figuring out how this whole thing works and more important what the implementation process for my application will be.
Something that I’ve noticed right from the beginning is the lack of tutorials and articles about AMFPHP 1.9, yeh I know it’s still beta but anyway there should be at least a few good simple examples to bring people up & running with it, a basic hello world example is nice but it would also be nice to see some more complex examples easiyl explained. Over the course of the next weeks, I’ll be consolidating all my functions into AMFPHP services and will try to get as much as I can from it.
What is your experience with AMFPHP? Do you use it with Flex or Flash, how easy was it to gear up and be able to use it on a production environment? Do you have any special sites where you go grab informations about it?
Looking forward to your reactions.
The AMFPHP comes before ASSQL but.. by Tiago's Weblog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Switzerland License.
Hey,
Sorry to hear the PHP Flash Policy file server didn’t work for you. If your still interested in using asSQL I would be willing to work with you to create a solution that would work for you.
I am planning to have another release of asSQL soon, so if I could get a solution to this problem in the release that would be good.
If your interested please feel free to email me directly, or post in the asSQL group (http://groups.google.com/group/asSQL)
I found that the tutorials and videos for AMFPHP are really confusing and sped through without much explaining about what does what. He talks really fast, makes a lot of jokes I don’t really understand and references to random people. I’m thankful for there being some tutorials at all, but they seriously need some better ones. I’ve avoided using it up until now (because Lee Brimlow has started a tut series for them) just because I find them too difficult to grab hold of. I think I got to the point of setting it up locally, but that’s as far as I got. Good luck!
Matt, thanks for your generous offer, altough I don’t see a way to workaround the problem of the PHP Daemon, there is no hosting company as far as I know that allows the usage of such daemons on their shared hosting solutions.
Jarryd You absolutely right, AMFPHP has not a lot of tutorials/articles/videos around for the new version 1.9beta, that may be because the original author of AMFPHP has retired from the flash/flex world to follow new paths. The new person in charge Wade Arnold has already started to improve the functionality and interoperability with Flex3 and now implementing the AMFPHP functionality into the Zend Framework which hopefully will bring more developers to this awesome project.