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Integrating Flex & PHP - An Introductory Tutorial

Submitted by LarryUllman on Thu, 2009/05/28 - 1:15pm
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Adding New Employees
The third PHP script handles the adding of new employees. You could submit new records to this script using a standard HTML form, but I’m using pure Flex instead (see the next figure).

 

 

Regardless of where the data comes from, the PHP page that handles the new employee data needs to validate it, insert the record into the database, and report upon the results. The add_employee.php script in the downloadable source code does all this. Looking at that code, you’ll see that…

 

•    I’m performing just basic validation of the three values; this could be improved upon using regular expressions.
•    For extra security, I use prepared statements, which will prevent SQL injection attacks.
•    The script creates no HTML, just plain text.
This last point is the most important, as the results of this script (i.e., whatever would otherwise be seen in the Web browser) will be displayed in an alert box by the Flex application (see the next two figures).





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larry_ullman_flex_php1_code.zip382.27 KB
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Comments

dazweeja replied on Thu, 2009/05/28 - 6:34pm

Although I realise this is an introductory tutorial, I think using XML is more error-prone and probably has the same level of difficulty as using AMFPHP or ZendAMF. Using AMF means lower bandwidth and removing the extra step of echoing out lines of XML. Much easier and safer to send an array of typed objects which means your client and server-side code can be much more closely aligned.

LarryUllman replied on Sun, 2009/05/31 - 9:10pm in response to: dazweeja

Thanks for your feedback. I agree that using AMF often makes sense. But as you point out, this is an introductory tutorial, so I wanted to limit the number of foreign concepts discussed. Plus, XML, which can be a pain to debug, is often a logical chioce, too. Moreover, XML is often a required format, like when working with third-party data feeds. But for those going further with their PHP-Flex development, looking into AMF is a logical step. Thanks again!

dengiz replied on Sun, 2009/06/07 - 7:34pm

thanks a lot for this great tutorial. That is exactly what I was searching for!

Just one question: departments_xml.php didn't function properly. I couldn't find why.

LarryUllman replied on Mon, 2009/06/15 - 1:32pm

You're quite welcome. Glad it was helpful and thanks for the nice words. As for the XML file, what happens if you run it directly in your browser? Does it return proper XML or an error? And do make sure you run it through a URL.

kalchuka replied on Sat, 2009/06/20 - 6:42am

thnks for this tutorial. please can you help explain to me how to make use of amfphp with flex. i ve read a lot of article but seem not to grab the thing. i already know how to do php

LarryUllman replied on Mon, 2009/06/22 - 10:12am

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try to put together something on amfphp+Flex and will post a URL once I've done so. It'll be a while, though, as I'm in the middle of some other projects right now.

danieldourado_2 replied on Tue, 2009/07/14 - 5:02pm

I really would like to thank you for this tutorial, Ive been searching for 2 days in order to find a tutorial with examples which i could understand, yours is the best ive found, thank you!

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