RIA Weekly 20 – Zend's Andi Gutmans on PHP and Flex at ZendCon 2008

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Andi Gutmans tells us about the RIA related announcements at ZendCon this morning. First, he goes through the announcements:

• making the Zend Studio and Flex Builder work together in the present and targeting better integration, like debugging in the future
• Adobe’s work and contribution to link up AMF to Zend-land
• And then ongoing education and evangelizing around PHP and Flex

Check out Andi’s write-up on his blog as well.

We then discuss how PHP is primarily used in the RIA world, namely, as a gateway to the back-end for the UI layer. Along those lines, we discuss the existing use of PHP by Flex developers – Andi says Adobe told him 25% of Flex users are using PHP.

I ask Andi to talk about the types of applications that might benefit from this Adobe/Zend partnership: he cites intranet business applications, those that include multi-media interfaces, and also the Automotive Computer Services customer example cited in the press release around the announcement.

Finally, Andi being a self-proclaimed open source person, I ask him how he resolves the closed nature of Flex, namely, the Flash player. As we discus, while Adobe has opened up so much more of Flex, there’s still that closed core. Bouncing of the idea of “if it works for you use it” we talk about other UI technologies, like Silverlight, that Zend may be interested in partnering more closely with if interests arises in the PHP community.

And, the previous episode we reference at the begining was indeed, from Microsoft MIX, episode #009b to be exact.

Disclosure: Zend and Adobe are clients, as are Microsoft and IBM.