Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide

Introduction to PHP

PHP, which stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (yes, it is a recursive acronym), is an open source scripting language that borrows its syntax from C, Java, and Perl, just to name a few. The result is a language that feels familiar to many programmers. This makes a lot of sense, since the stated goal of PHP is to help web developers create dynamic content quickly, and nothing speeds up coding like knowing the language!

PHP’s capabilities are similar to other server-side languages, such as ColdFusion, ASP, and JSP. In addition, because it’s an open source language, PHP is constantly gaining new capabilities via extensions. There are even a few extensions that allow PHP to create Flash content dynamically. Furthermore, the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) offers a huge online repository of PHP components, available at http://pear.php.net or via the special pear command-line tool, which is installed with PHP.

PHP installs onto nearly every server platform available, and it integrates with all of the major web servers, including both Apache and IIS. As its name suggests, PHP is a preprocessor that executes code in PHP pages when they are requested. The result is then sent to the web server and finally delivered to the client. You never have to compile PHP pages explicitly; PHP handles all of the processing of PHP pages for you.

PHP code can be written in either a procedural or object-oriented manner. That said, AMFPHP requires that you write ...