Adobe® Flex® 3 Bible

Chapter 29. Integrating Flex Applications with PHP

PHP has become one of the most widely used application scripting frameworks on the Web. Originally standing for Personal Home Page, PHP has evolved into a high-performance application server technology that's used both to dynamically generate Web pages and to provide a middleware layer for rich client applications such as those built with Flex.

Tip

The term PHP is used to refer to both the server technology and the programming language used to create dynamic Web functionality.

In addition to its core feature set, PHP has extensibility features that allow developers to create and add modules as needed. PEAR ( PHP Extension and Application Repository), in the words of its creators, offers both a "structured library of open-source code for PHP users" and a "system for code distribution and package maintenance." It also encourages a standardized approach to formatting PHP code, including recommendations for indentation, identifier naming, and other issues that sometimes invite controversy between developers.

PHP is portable between operating systems. Binary distributions of PHP are available for these operating systems:

• AS/400

• Mac OS X

• Novell NetWare

• OS/2

• RISC OS

• SGI IRIX 6.5.x

• Solaris (SPARC, INTEL)

• Windows

PHP is also included in most distributions of Linux and is available in source format that allows you to customize and build your own PHP distributions.

In addition to all of these benefits, PHP is completely free. Because it's a free, open-source ...