Author: Arnold Biffna

The back end for most of my flash portfolio is using AMFPHP Flash Remoting. It’s a free library that came out years ago. I still like it because its performs well and is easy to install-just edit some configs and upload. It’s been a great journey into PHP/mysql as a back end for AS3, and has allowed me to make several RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications) on my own.

For Flash based apps that use a back end, I like Flash Remoting better than JSON, AJAX, REST services, or server side generated xml. I have an opinion on this because I’ve used all of them. Here’s my reasons:

• Flash sends and receives native Flash objects with any level of hierarchy and complexity. For example, an array of objects containing strings, numbers, and other objects containing arrays of objects. This leads to the next point:
• No serialization or de-serialization is required, ( the information received is Flash native ). For example, in AS3, you might access your returned data with “response.people.id[7].areaCode“
• It’s faster because it’s compressed binary, rather than large uncompressed strings
• It’s faster because it’s socket layer communications, rather than standard http requests

Also, for some speed demo on this, see James Ward’s benchmark.

I know that this particular implementation of Flash Remoting might not suit the needs of a large, enterprise based back end – but there are enterprise level remoting solutions out there. Several flavors are available, not only with PHP, and not all opensource. I’ll post some links of these:

Adobe Live Cycle ( JAVA )

WebORB (.NET, JAVA, PHP, Rails)

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server

BlazeDS ( JAVA )

Zend AMF ( PHP )

An expanded version of the getDirectory call, but also uses the file name as a key to more information in the database. This is useful for describing media such as video, sound, and pictures. It’s part of my MediaService class in AMFPHP.

To try it out:

1. go to http://as3.actionscriptdude.com/amfphp/browser/
2. Click on MediaService
3. click on getDirectoryAndFilesInfo
4. for the dir_ parameter, type in public/vids
5. click on Submit Query
6. You should see a list of objects containing information about each video file

This is used in the Video Playlist example.

PHP Source:

getDirectoryAndFilesInfo($dir_)
{
  // create an array to hold directory list
  $result = array();
  $directory="../../" . $dir_;
  result = array();
  // create a handler for the directory
  $handler = opendir($directory);
  //do not allow if directory contains ".." SECURITY BREACH!
  $breach = strpos($dir_,"..");
  if ($breach === false  ) {

    // keep going until all files in directory have been read
    while ($file = readdir($handler)) {
      if ($file != '.' && $file != '..')
      {
        $path_parts = pathinfo($file);
        $ext=strtolower($path_parts["extension"]);
        $fObj=array();
        $fObj["name"]=$file;
        $fObj["size"]= filesize($directory . "/" . $file);
        $fObj["extension"]=$ext;
        $fObj["isdir"]=is_dir($directory . "/" . $file);

        if ($fObj["isdir"] || $ext=="flv" || $ext=="jpg" || $ext=="mp3" || $ext=="png")
        {

          $sql2="SELECT COUNT(*) FROM comments WHERE file= '$file'";
          $query2 = mysql_query($sql2);
          $getrow2 =  mysql_fetch_array($query2);
          $fObj["commentcount"]=$getrow2[0];

          $sql="SELECT *  FROM filedetails WHERE filename= '" . $file . "'";
          $query = mysql_query($sql);
          $getrow =  mysql_fetch_array($query);
          $fObj["lookup"] = $getrow ;

          array_push($result,$fObj);
        }
      }
    }

    // tidy up: close the handler
    closedir($handler);
  }
  return $result;
}

“getDirectory” is part of my PortfolioService in AMFPHP. It gets the files in a directory and provides info about them such as the name, size, and extension. This information can be read by Flash via Flash Remoting and is received as an array of objects which is binary compressed.

It’s real usefulness is for media viewers (images, sound, video). Once you build a player that uses this service, you can update new songs, videos, etc by simply uploading them to the same folder, and the media is automatically available to the application using the service.

To see live data similar to image above:

1. go to http://as3.actionscriptdude.com/amfphp/browser/
2. Click on PortfolioService
3. click on getDirectory
4. for the dir_ parameter, type in mp3
5. click on Submit Query
6. You should see a list of objects containing information about each mp3 file

The “mp3” query is used by the MP3 player example.