I must say the older I’m getting the more pessimistic I’m about new technologies. All this buzz around RIA .. I was never tried to understand what is going on there, technologies are changing one other: Laszlo, OpenLaszlo, Flex, AIR, Silverlight. Last thing I’ve heard was that Flex with AMFPHP is something worth of my attention and I decided it’s finally time to look into that. I killed whole weekend looking into this and passed full path from euphoria (“wow that’s the best thing i’ve ever seen”) to deep disappointment (“shit i’ll never use it in real life project”). But a few good conclusions I made for myself:
1. Flex is the most perspective technology compared to the others (of course it’s subjective opinion but I know that I have good feeling on such things and I dont want to explain here why I think so but I’d be happy to read here another opinions)
2. Symfony could easily be tied with Flex (however there is really luck of information regard this, mostly non-responded questions on forum like this http://www.symfony-project.org/forum/index.php/m/46982/ or plugin bridge for amfPHP http://trac.symfony-project.org/wiki/sfAmfphpPlugin)
I was half way to start doing this integrating but before that I decided to figure out what is its perspectives and the result is my disappointment.. Why? There is real luck of good samples for Flex 3/PHP. Right now I keep in mind that it might be good to built RIA backend and I’d need for this datagrid with ability to paginate results and filter them and also I’d need authorization component with credentials and easy way to restrict access for different type of users. I did not find such sample. Flex Builder 3 generates CRUD code but without paginating/filtering (why what is the sense of datagrid which is not able to paginate data and which is slowly dying because of 1K records in table), there are also some paginating samples but not tied to mysql, there are simple authentification samples but they are too simple to be used in real projects. I have nothing to start with.. They show me cool charts and zoom animation but all I need is good working sample. And what is bad there is no open-source projects where I can look how this can be done (there are some but they are mostly not about Flex/PHP – http://ntt.cc/2008/04/09/over-30-useful-as3-open-source-projects.html). I know I want too much but how I can start using it (I really want) without these little bricks. Or maybe Flex is wrong decision and I need to look more into Silverlight or so. Is there anyone who could help me to solve this puzzle?