Building RIA

Applications in PHP
John Coggeshall
 Introductions
•  Welcome!
•  About me
•  CTO of Automotive
Computer Services (ACS)
•  Core PHP 5 Dev

•  Author, Speaker

Presentation Title 2 John Coggeshall

Agenda
•  Building RIA Applications! (Duh)
•  Specifically…
•  A bit of history of the project

•  Building RIA applications using Adobe Flex/AIR with

Zend Framework
•  Challenges in creating RIA applications that reflect
client-side applications
•  Demos, Technical Discussions, etc.

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History
•  ACS has a single product
called a DMS (Dealer
Management System)
•  Originally Built in DOS-
based Foxpro (1992)
•  Migrated to Visual Foxpro
(2004)

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History
•  Software runs off of
a Samba share on a
slackware server
•  Every modifies the
same “local” database
file
•  Cross-location
interaction via Remote
Desktop

5
We’re Doomed!
•  Besides the obvious technical limitations of
the system, our product had problems that
hold up our business:
•  No data sharing

•  No ability to sell to large mega-dealerships that

require data sharing
•  No data analytics

•  Data… Data… data… data…. problems

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Our Solution..
•  The solution: An internet-based DMS
•  PHP / Zend Framework to the rescue!

•  One problem: Our Customers

•  Very fickle about technology

•  Were largely very happy with DOS applications

•  Our solution needs to really feel like a desktop

application, without being one

•  We’re still doomed!

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We’re Saved!
•  Adobe AIR / Flex to the
Rescue!
•  With Flex / AIR for the user-
interface and PHP/ZF on the
backend we are able to
accomplish all of our goals
•  Flex/AIR provides the user-
experience demanded by our users
•  PHP / ZF provide the server-side
magic
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Our Development Stack
•  Zend Studio for Eclipse
•  PHP / ZF development

•  Adobe FlexBuilder 3 plugin for Eclipse

•  Front-end Development

•  VMWare development server

•  To host PHP application – when VMware behaves

•  Compile/Run Flex Front-end Locally

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Server Setup
•  MySQL Database
•  Some stored procedures for complex
manipulations

•  Multi-Protocol architecture
•  Supports RPC calls via “REST-ish” XML services as
well as the Adobe AMF format via the Zend_Amf
component of Zend Framework

10
Frontend Setup
•  Adobe Flex and AIR runtime (duh)
•  Fundamentally a PureMVC-based architecture

•  (slowly moving away from that)

•  A fair amount of custom code for data-transfer

over the AMF protocol
•  We can’t use the standard Flex RemoteObject
facilities (only works with something like
BlazeDS)

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Code!
Not without problems
•  Flex and AIR work pretty well with PHP,
but there are a lot of problems
•  Lack of Server-push technology available on the
PHP side makes saving data pretty painful
•  Have to devise your own saving mechanisms and
keep them consistent
•  Lack of Server-push makes collaboration painful
across clients

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Hardware == Painful
•  As powerful as AIR is a platform, it has a
serious flaw
•  NO support for hardware on any level means all of
those bar-code scanners, driver’s license scanners,
custom printers we use suddenly can’t be used
•  … Okay, now we’re really doomed.

14
PHP^H^H^HJava!!
•  Of all things, Java comes to the rescue!
•  The Merapi project
•  http://www.merapiproject.net

•  Provides a Java “server” that runs alongside the

AIR application
•  AIR can communicate with Merapi through a
socket, serializing objects back and forth and
making RPC calls
•  Merapi can communicate with hardware for us

15
Deployment
•  New Problem: Deployment
•  AIR has great facilities for this

•  ANT-based build system builds AIR packages,

deploys codebase on server(s)
•  Future: CruiseControl for CI / Testing

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Final Thoughts..
•  Flex/AIR is the right tool for our job
•  Even though it’s NOT the right tool for our job
(yet)
•  Offers a much more compelling user experience
than we could produce with JS/HTML/CSS
•  Definitely not the right tool for every job

•  Of course, the PHP side just works™ for

the most part
•  Questions?
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We’re Hiring!
•  Thank you!
•  Interested in
working on a
project like this?
We’re hiring!
•  See our full-page ad
in the conference
program and visit
us at the Job Fair!

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