newvibes

I was pointed in the direction of this magnificent flash remoting app called AMFPHP. It’s a Remote Procedure Call toolkit for Flash that enables you to extract data remotely and return it into your Flash movie. It’s brilliant for extracting information from databases and works quick as a flash. I found so easy to install into my Flash application and using it is easy with the examples given on the website. I’m not sure when I’m going to need to use XML again when I’ve got this by my side.

RPC is basically a way for a client to interact with the server. Essentially you don’t need to worry about how you are going to send and receive data since the toolkit takes care of this for you. All you need to do is call a method, create a callback and receive the data ready for you to manipulate.

I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with Flash that has required interaction with XML and PHP and using this tool has made things much much easier. I don’t have to parse XML anymore now that I can access database tables directly using my AMFPHP service classes.

The site has a pretty decent collection of examples and video tutorials to help you learn to use it effectively. There is also a discussion forum available for amfphp development. Right now I’ve been doing pretty basic stuff but when I move onto Actionscript 3 development I’m hoping that this will be a major item in my tool box.