As you may have heard, Adobe has made a partnership with Zend Studios (the keepers of PHP, and the Zend Framework) to ensure that Flex/AIR development with PHP is as seamless as possible. This is *huge* news for PHP developers out there, myself being one of them. Christophe Coenraets, Senior Technical Evangelist at Adobe, came by the Adobe Seattle site last night to give a presentation to a couple of local user groups in town and I managed to pick his brain about the new partnership...what to expect, and what's in the works.

Well, as mentioned in the press release, a key deliverable for the collaboration is integration of the Action Message Format (AMF) into the Zend Framework. For those of you unfamiliar, AMF is a binary message protocol supported by Flex. Using AMF is preferable to other types of messaging formats, such as RESTful XML and serialization over HTTP for various reasons. First, XML and serialization (say with JSON) is plain-text, and so it isn't very secure. Second, since it is plain-text, it's inefficient. Binary, not only obfuscates the message, but compresses it significantly. So, native AMF support in the Zend Framework is huge for developing enterprise-level applications!

Also, given this integration of AMF into the Zend Framework, Zend and Adobe are also working to make a more unified IDE! They already have a good start...Flex Builder is built off of Eclipse, and Zend Studio is also built off of Eclipse. What Christophe showed us last night is that even though nothing has been released in terms of a unified IDE yet, you can start using one now anyways. Simply download Zend Studio (the PHP IDE), and install the Flex Builder plug-in for Eclipse, but specify the Zend Studio installation directory as your base Eclipse folder instead. Once this is done, you have a single portal for both your Flex, AIR, and PHP projects!

All of this is in it's earliest stages, but seeing steps in this direction is very exciting. I can't wait to see what's next :)

Charles