PHPMeetup Boston, June 2006

June 1st was once again PHP Meetup Boston night. Mark Withington, the organizer had invited Mike Potter from Adobe's Developer Relations team to present about the upcoming Flex 2.0 web-application framework and how to use it with PHP back-end applications. Mike gave an impressive overview of Flex 2.0 and how easy it is to create impressive user interfaces with a few lines of xml and ActionScript.

Here is what I took away from this meeting:

1. Flex 2.0 is a really impressive development and expected to be out within the next 60 days. See for yourself, what Mike did with Flex2.0 and Drupal. He also demonstrated an open source PHP-Flex bridge, called AMFPHP. Flex 2.0 competes with open source projects such as OpenLaszlo and ZK1. However, Mike thinks it is the stronger platform. He said that a basic command line SDK will be free and the Flex 2.0 developer IDE based on Eclipse will be less than $1000 per developer license.
2. Mike described another project that
piqued my interest. The project is called Adobe Apollo and is expected to come out by the end of the year. He described it as a stand alone flash application engine, that can be used to package Flash (and Flex) based applications to be installed on a user's desktop. The really cool statement to me was that it also should run AJAX based applications.

3. Mike also did a cool demo of 3D objects embedded in PDF documents and animated through JavaScript. He showed off an impressive 3D rendering of a turbine which he was able to pan and rotate as well as to have the turbine wheel spinning, while doing so. And all this in a 300K document you can e-mail and print (w/o the animation off course).
4. Triggered by a question from the audience, Mike briefly introduced Adobe's AJAX framework, called Spry. This also looks very powerful and I have to revisit this topic, once I learned a bit more about it.

This was an evening really well spent. I learned a lot and met a bunch of great people. If you are a PHP developer or a software developer in Boston, I highly recommend to go to the PHP Meetup.