What’s Up With All the PHP? Or My New(ish) Role at Adobe
I’ve been blogging more recently about PHP, which may be confusing for people who know me and my ColdFusion background. But in looking at things, the PHP community has been incredibly vibrant and successful on a number of fronts. We’ve started adding more support for PHP developers through partnerships and support of things like Zend AMF, the PHP Data Wizards in Flex Builder, and encouraging community speakers at events like ZendCon. On the Adobe side, Mihai Corlan has done a fantastic job of creating resources for PHP developers who want to learn Flex. The team needed someone to take the lead here in North America and I asked to do it (Lee is busy with cool Flash stuff and going to Latin and South America). So now PHP developers have a go-to guy here in North America working to further the PHP agenda here at Adobe and helping more PHP developers be successful with Flex and Flash.
So why me, someone with little PHP experience? I’ve always felt like evangelism is about growing your developer community and developer relations is about helping the community you have. At Adobe we don’t really have a specific developer relations role (it’s basically Mike Chambers) so the evangelists end up doing both. Which is fun because our community is awesome. But I also wanted a challenge and to grow professionally as an evangelist. I thought the best way to do that would be to get out of my comfort zone, immerse myself in a new technology, and execute on ideas that could be applied to any technology by any evangelist.
Luckily we’re working with some great PHP people and the PHP community is a very welcoming and open place. There are a lot of places where PHP and Flash fit really well together so there are features like data visualization, collaboration, video, and data-heavy applications where I think PHP developers can use Flash in a helpful way. And in the process hopefully I’ll end up being a better evangelist and helping to grow the number of Flex developers.
If you’ve got ideas, or applications that show off Flash and PHP together, I’d love to hear them. You can always drop me an email at ryan@adobe.com or call/text me at (307) 438-9716. I think 2010 is going to be a huge year for PHP and Flash momentum.
January 18th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
http://florum.sourceforge.net/ is a project i started earlier this year using zend amf and flex. I’ve let it go for several months so it’s due for a zend upgrade and some php redesigns of stuff that I think I should have done differently.
Zend_Amf + Flex is an absolute dream to use.
January 18th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
This is so awesome, Ryan. Big need for this.
I wast just on RIA Radio saying my favorite all time language was PHP.
Let me know if I can help in anyway.
January 18th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Hi Ryan,
I’ve been using PHP and Flash for years now and I’m really glad to hear that Adobe is getting official with it!
You can check out my forum over at http://www.mxprojects.com to have a little look on your own.
*cough* Auto-complete PHP in Flash Builder (or at least the Dreamweaver engine) *cough*
January 18th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
No worries, PHP is just like ColdFusion . . . okay, I’m just saying that to make you feel better. That they both run on a server is about the only thing they have in common. Buy you’re a bright boy. You’ll get your head around it.
January 18th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
By the way, the Ryan in the comment up there is a different ryan than the blog owner.
I’ll include my last initial when posting here from now on.
January 18th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
Maybe you can convince Adobe to include Quercus open source java PHP into ColdFusion server and we can start bringing Php developers into the CF server fold!!
Although I have to ask the above posters do you actually like programming in Php and actually like the syntax? I really hated working in Php before I discovered ColdFusion, the syntax just seemed so wrong on most accounts, now it is even worse with the strange slash filled namespace notation among other things, I had always assumed people used it because it was already so popular and it was a sheep thing. I had never thought anyone would actually enjoy working with it to be honest. Maybe I need to take a look and see if Php 5.2 has added in something to change the syntax I wasn’t aware of… I last used 5.0.1 for a few months…
January 19th, 2010 at 7:30 am
We have been using Flash and PHP at work (http://www.computaught.com/) since early 2004 for our computer based training system and it has worked great for us. The project started out with AS2 and XMLRPC and currently it’s AS3 + AIR still using XMLRPC until we convert over to AMF. I’ve already done tests and see great benefits with using Zend AMF.
We don’t have a demo link to the new player but if you are interested in checking it out I can always send you an account to play around with.
I’m glad to hear Adobe is getting even more involved with the community and look forward to having more toys to play with.
January 19th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Very exciting! My company, Archinoetics, has a K-12 educational outreach effort called Project Niu. I built a Flex / Google Maps / Google Checkout mashup with an AMFPHP / MySQL backend to track ocean buoys around Hawaii.
http://maps.projectniu.org
Looking forward to switching it over to Zend AMF soon, though the existing setup has worked great for this and other projects (hundreds of thousands of visitors and counting).
January 20th, 2010 at 5:02 pm
Glad to hear it! PHP has it’s quirks, but I love it, and Zend frameworks are great!
January 21st, 2010 at 2:28 am
Good choice! PHP is my fav serverside language as it’s so easy to use and has the best documentation ever.
J
BTW: Happy B-day yesterday!