Now one of the worst pieces of working with Flex is cross domain security, oh how I hate it sometimes. Now I understand that there is a reason that the Flash player can’t just grab information from any domain it wants all willy nilly, but sometimes this really hampers getting something built. Silverlight also has this issue, and recently I went over using Yahoo Pipes for a proxy for a Silverlight Twitter Client. Today I am going to show how to build a simple PHP script to use as a cross domain proxy. Read More »

I am a big fan of LINQ (if you don’t know what it is check out our Intro to LINQ Tutorial in C#) and I just started playing with an interesting php library, PHPLinq (created by Maarten Balliauw), for integrating a LINQ-like syntax into PHP. This tutorial is going to go over the basics of using this library and some of the cool things that can be done with it. Read More »

So, we now have a pretty common appearance of Web 2.0 across the world, but what exactly is Web 2.0? Really there are not set definitions or rules behind Web 2.0, it is just a way of describing a new set of technologies that have recreated the web. One of the more exciting and cool technologies is asynchronous server communication, sometimes referred as AJAX. With AJAX you don’t need to refresh a page to get information from the server. You can call server pages and get the response, all with Javascript. In this tutorial I will show you the most basic way to get a response from a PHP script. Read More »

When using Flex you often need to transfer data to a backend server, and one option to do this is to use XML; this tutorial is going to explain the basics of sending XML data to PHP. I am going to show how to build XML data using Flex’s built in classes and then we will send the data over to PHP to be handled however you would like. The code for this tutorial is arranged slightly different than earlier tutorial, all the ActionScript code is in separate files that are included into the mxml. This technique is very similar to one used for ASP.Net pages (basically a code behind) - and helps to separate the logic code from the display. Read More »

The last tutorial on Flex and PHP included some code to send data back and forth from a MySQL database. One of the comments asked a question about sending only the relevant updated data to the server and I decided it would be nice to write a tutorial on how to do this. I am going to build off of the last tutorial for this so if you haven’t looked at it I would advise it. Along with only updating the data that changes we are also going to differentiate between an update and delete. Read More »

To follow-up on the Flex and PHP tutorial we did earlier I thought it would be nice to do a complete tutorial on php, mysql, flex, and json. This tutorial should show a decent way to send data in a database to and from flex to php using json. Read More »

Everybody loves the Web 2.0 style of no page loads and seamless transitions (almost everybody). But there are some security limitations placed on the xmlhttp callback objects that make life a little difficult sometimes. For instance, if your page originated on the server http://blog.paranoidferret.com/, you are only allowed to use the xmlhttp request object to request data from http://blog.paranoidferret.com/. If you try and request data from https://blog.paranoidferret.com/, the request will throw an exception and you’ll get nowhere. Read More »

To make sure we don’t get too stuck in a rut with our tutorial posts I decided to branch out a little bit and talk about Adobe Flex 2.0. I recently spent a lot of time figuring out how to do this. Basically what I am going to go over here is how to use php and json to send data to your flex application, and then how to use that data in Flex. Read More »