HomePHP Page 3 - Rich Internet Applications: Introduction to Adobe Flex and PHP
Building the Application - PHP
AJAX is popular for the creation of rich Internet applications, but there are good alternatives. This article will introduce you to Flex applications, rich Internet applications that run inside the Adobe Flash player.
Up until now, everything should seem fairly familiar. We've got a PHP script and a MySQL database. Now it's time to start building the interface to our application.
Flex applications are built using a combination of ActionScript (AS) 3.0 and MXML. ActionScript is based on ECMA Script (same as JavaScript), so it should be familiar to web developers. MXML is an XML based layout engine for Flex applications.
Essentially, you lay out the UI using XML, and script the UI using ActionScript. The MXML for our interface is, again, very simple (only 26 lines!).