We are using staging server inside our organization (CentOS) to test the applications that we work on. We heavily use AMFPHP based PHP services to do communication between business logic and client front end in flash.

Team requested to have native JSON support for PHP and I found a very simple way to do it as following:

1. Login to shell prompt with user credentials (which allows you to install stuff on server).
2. Execute command yum update “*php*”
3. This should update all PHP related components to the latest version. (Assuming you installed yum etc., on CentOS)
4. Once done that, You will require to install Pear based JSON support by following command.
5. pecl install json
6. This will install JSON, simply wait and cross your fingers! If it says OK in last 2 lines, everything is fine so far.
7. You will also require to enable JSON support in php.ini
8. Smart way to do that is, create a new file in /etc/php.d/ called json.ini
9. The file should contain this line: extension=json.so
10. Finally, restart the HTTP (Apache) Server by command: service httpd restart

Done! Here is the all keyboard actions together, after you logged in:

yum update “*php*”

pecl install json

cd /etc/php.d/

echo “extension=json.so” >> json.ini

service httpd restart

Patrick Mineault, Who supercharged the AMFPHP project and give re-birth to this open source project, announced an UnOfficial version of AMFPHP on his Blog.

Here are the new features list for AMFPHP:

• A brand new engine
• Multiple charsets and languages support
• Paged resultsets
• Massive speedup on large resultsets
• Better debugging events support
• Tighter integration with the service browser panel
• SQLite and MySQLi support
• PHP5 support
• Cookieless sessions
• HTML-based service browser with automatic code generation

So, Rush and Contribute any bugs you find … Also see if it breaks your current applications … and if so then please keep him updated!

Few Links of your use:

Download: AMFPHP 1.0 beta (UnOfficial) Last updated on 26th of March

AMFPHP Project Site

Development and Documentation WiKi

Nice tutorial by Sephiroth regarding AMFPHP, Serializer Class, Datagrid data binding and sending objects to flash from PHP via remoting.

Read Tutorial