Blog for Nayan

I was at Adobe Max this year and Using PHP Data services with Flex was one of the sessions i attended. It was a very informative one and showed how one needs to do very little work to use remoting with PHP.

Flex 4 has some powerful wizards to use data services and it makes it lot easier to get data into Flash. The value objects are created for you and all the heavy lifting is done by Flex.

It uses Zend Framework for remoting but the best part is you don’t have to write any php code, only some MySQL queries to get the required data.


This is not a tutorial but a working example of how i was able to connect a Zen Cart database with my Flex Application and it took me less than a day to get this working, the main part was spent of learning the zen cart db structure and then writing the MySQL query to get the products list. I am sure any shopping cart can be easily connected.


To have little more fun with it, i also threw in the layout managers which come with Flex 4 and demonstrated how easy it is to change the look and feel of your application. I am not a designer but using Flash Catalyst one can easily make this application very visually appealing too.

http://nayansavla.com/zen/flex-output/zen.html This is the Flex application which pulls in the products from the zen cart.

http://nayansavla.com/zen/ This is the HTML default version which comes with the Zen Cart.

http://nayansavla.com/zen/admin admin/admin if you want to change the products and then see them update in the Flex application.

This was very easy to accomplish, i am not going to share the code sorry. The Flex 4 data services makes it so easy todevelop a CRUD system.

Edit: I have rebuilt my server so the html version of zen cart doesn’t work need to update it. But the flex works.

Finally one of my big freelance projects has seen the light of the day. Audiolife.com has been launched as beta and the reviews are positive. There is a lot more work in the pipeline with this widget, have to make it customizable so that the user can change the look and feel of it as well as the size. Exciting times…. 

 

This is the widget i created for them, 

This Flex widget uses Cairngorm Framework to communicate with the webservices.

This is an old Application i did sometime during July – Sept 2004. Here is the link to it,http://www.nayansavla.com/tilepainter/

You can selected the tiles from the drop down menu on the left and then paint them, layout will allow you to rotate the tiles etc.

I don’t have it connected to the php backend which allows to save and retrieve your work.

Brainvita was the first game i created in Flash and it was done sometime in early 2000 using Flash 4. I vividly remember how the only programming that could be done is using drop down menus. 

I lost the source code for it when a Linux installation attempt went bad and i lost all the data. I had backup of the swf file but then it had this annoying music which wasn’t fun. 

I then decided to re-create it in Flex and here it is. I need to work on the graphics and add more functionality to make it a nice Facebook application.

The rules for this game are outlined here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peg_solitaire