An Architect's View

corfield.org & Fusebox

Back in November, I rewrote corfield.org using Fusebox for PHP and I promised I would write up the experience. I've finally found the time this weekend so now you can read what I did and what I thought of it.

Flash Remoting & PHP: MyPhoto

Already reported elsewhere but worth another mention, Robert Hall has ported the MyPhoto application from DRK2 to use PHP as the back end. This shows a couple of things, one of which is that the amfphp project on sourceforge has been improving steadily since it now has a PHP gateway for auto-discovering services. Seeing MyPhoto running puts my earlier example to shame so I'll have to do something about that!

Macromedia DevNet & PHP

PHP is featured very highly in the latest Macromedia DevNet update. Lots of articles about building sites in PHP, covering how to set up your environment (Linux, PHP, Apache, MySQL), PHP and IIS, PHP and Mac OS X, PHP and server-side graphics and hand-coding PHP. Take advantage of Dreamweaver MX to build better PHP sites!

Flash Remoting & PHP

A fascinating development of late has been the appearance of some PHP code that allows you to use Flash Remoting with PHP. You can read the initial flurry of discussions on Flash Database's forum. There's explanations of the machinery and links to the code. I downloaded it and, after several subtle problems, got it working. Things to watch out for: when you download the PHP code, make sure you have no rogue whitespace characters in the files (either illegal whitespace inside the <? ... ?> or any whitespace outside the <? ... ?>). The original code from "musicman" handles byte ordering and works on both Mac and Windows. The current code on SourceForge is Windows only because it does not handle byte ordering correctly.

p.s. I'm still bummed that Safari doesn't support Flash Remoting.

Whither Fusebox?

Someone reminded me today that I promised to write up my experiences with converting my website from "plain" PHP to Fusebox. Yes, yes, yes. I will get to it. I'm kind of snowed right now, trying to finish the new macromedia.com (along with many other folks) so cut me some slack. I will just say that it wasn't as unpleasant as I'd initially expected... No faint praise from me!

Methodology

An interesting article on kdub's log about choosing technology and methodology based on 'best tool for the job'. Kurt Wiersma has a great mix of content on his blog covering Java, OS X, ColdFusion and PHP which are all subjects near to my heart!

Fuseboxed

Well, I decided to launch the new version of my site tonight, built with Fusebox 3 for PHP. It should behave mostly like the old site. Let me know if you find any problems with it. I'll be updating quite a bit of content over the next few evenings and also writing up more thoughts about Fusebox now that I've had more exposure and experience with it.

Fusebox & PHP

I just spent a reasonably enjoyable Sunday rewriting my personal site using Fusebox 3 for PHP (as I promised I would when I reviewed Nat and Jeff's book, a while back). I launched the new version of the site on 11/13/2002. Most of the site is up and running under Fusebox although there are some sections that are just links to the old site - I'll work on those in the next few weeks and I'll also write up a full report. First impressions are: it's a fair bit of machinery to learn - and a couple of details had me stumped for an hour or so (since I'm trying to do this all from memory, rather than revert to Nat and Jeff's book!) - but overall it isn't too bad. The additional work of adding fuseactions to fbx_Switch.php whenever I create a new 'page' is a little annoying but the nested layouts means less files that include headers, footers and navigation which is an improvement. It's also proving a good opportunity to get rid of stray <font..> tags and move to consistent use of style sheets, as well as allowing me to restructure the directories to tidy up code (since Fusebox lets you totally hide your directory structure).