Ria Development With Flex And PHP

Building RIA with Zend Framework and PHP John Coggeshall Automotive Computer Services

Who am I: John Coggeshall
Chief Technology Officer, Automotive Computer Services
PHP Core Contributor
Former Sr. member of Zend Technologies Global Services
Author, geek, etc.
Welcome Jun 4, 2009 | |

Agenda today
Today we’re going to talk about building RIA applications in PHP
Specifically using Adobe Flex / AIR and PHP / Zend Framework
Discuss everything about creating the application
Development Environment and Tooling
Client-side Architecture
Server-side Architecture
Pulling it together
Demos
Jun 4, 2009 | |

Our Challenge
ACS has an existing system for managing car dealerships nationwide
Pure Client-side
Really old (written in Visual FoxPro!)
Current goal: Complete re-implementation of product as a thin-client application
Need to retain desktop-like functionality
Adobe AIR / Flex was selected as our GUI
Jun 4, 2009 | |

Why Flex? Why AIR?
Originally numerous options were considered for the front-end
HTML/JS using FireFox 3
XUL / JS
Flex offered the most reasonable rich-client solution
Extremely Rapid UI Development when compared to HTML / JS
Much more extendable / customizable then XUL / JS
AIR gave us more client-side flexibility
Access to Local file system
Access to local Hardware (or at least, we had options)
Jun 4, 2009 | |

Our Technology Stack
Our Development Environment: Zend Studio for Eclipse with numerous plug-ins
Flex Builder 3 Pro Plug-in
LogWatcher (GUI tail –f)
VMWare Virtual Machine for server
CentOS powered running Zend Core
MySQL 5.x database
Our Development Stack
Server: PHP 5.2 w/ Zend Framework 1.6
Client: Adobe Actionscript 3 / Flex w/PureMVC
Jun 4, 2009 | |

Client-Side Architecture
Based on PureMVC
( http://www.puremvc.org )
Singleton Controller, Model, View
Views are managed by Mediators
Models are implemented by Proxies
Controller actions are implemented through Commands
Jun 4, 2009 | |

Client-side Architecture
Primary communication via Notify/Observer pattern
(Proxies cannot observe)
Mediators bridge between Flex’s event model and the application
Proxies communicate with data sources
Jun 4, 2009 | |

Server-Side Architecture
RESTful services (currently) using e4x as its data transport
e4x is well supported in Flex, very easy to work with
Looking into AMF support in the near future (Zend_Amf)
MVC pattern with one controller
Action specifies the version
Controller Maps the request URI to a class implementing the Command pattern
Uses Zend Framework’s Plugin Architecture
Jun 4, 2009 | |

http://host/service/v1/command/auth.login
Maps to the ACS_Command_Auth_Login class
The execute() method is called
Located in ACS/Command/Auth/Login.php
Commands are given a reference to Zend_Controller as well to provide context
Full access to request, etc.
Views are also then mapped to command name
I.e. auth-login.xml.phtml
Jun 4, 2009 | |

Wanted to have the ability to allow front-end engineers to work without needing real services
Solution: Implement a dummy-xml ability into our services by including the ?dummy=1 GET parameter in our request
Behind the curtain, our ZF architecture will automatically find a dummy .xml file for a response
Jun 4, 2009 | |

Pulling it together
Now that we have both sides how can we more cleanly tie them together?
Already have a single IDE to do all development in
Extending the ActionScript HttpClient class to incorporate more stuff
Enhancement #1: No need to specify a URL, just the service name
Enhancement #2: Built-in support for “dummy” service requests
Enhancement #3: Support for the Zend Studio Debugger
Jun 4, 2009 | |

End-to-End Debugging and Profiling
Flex has a great Debugger / Profiler for Flex
Zend Studio for Eclipse has a great Debugger / Profiler for PHP
By extending the HttpClient Class, we can create a seamless end-to-end debug or profiling session using real web service requests
Already has saved us once hunting a very nasty bug
Jun 4, 2009 | |

What more can we do?
Web service developers need to document their services
We need to create application usage documentation
All documentation is written in DocBook format and stored in the repository
Developer guide can be seamlessly integrated into Eclipse using a custom Plugin
User Guide can be converted into HTML and shipped with product in chunk format (contextual help)
Jun 4, 2009 | |

Demo
Let’s see a demo of everything in action!
Jun 4, 2009 | |

What do we dislike?
As you can tell we’re very happy with AIR/Flex for the most part..
What is bad?
Deferred Instantiation can be a real pain
Sort of a memory / resource hog
Very easy to do write bad code in Flex
Lack of a fully-baked Unit Testing facility
Jun 4, 2009 | |

Thank you! Questions?

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Ria Development With Flex And PHP

by John Coggeshall on Sep 18, 2008

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