Webmaster Forum / Flash / Flash Remoting / October 2004

I've been trying to crack this one for a while.  In the past I've had MM's
ASP.NET remoting gateway up and running using Cassini ( a minimal .NET
server ) but I'm now thinking there could be a way to achieve the same king
of thing using PHP and AMFPHP which might overcome some of the licensing
issues.

In the same way Cassini is a .NET application to run ASP.NET pages, PHP now
ships with a command line interpreter (CLI) that can be used to run PHP
scripts outside the bounds of a web server.

I think that if I can write an HTTP server using PHP sockets and get it to
run PHP scripts, AMFPHP could be used to allow flash remoting to work on a
local computer with nothing more than PHP required!!

Of course you can add database support using SQLLite ( uses flat text files
for persistent data ) and the whole thing should ( in theory ) be portable
between computers, meaning that you could bundle it in an installer and use
the PHP HTTP server as the tier that connects your flash application to the
filesystem and OS.

Once again, there might be some licensing issues to overcome.  I did
consider using FlashORB's .NET solution but the pricing is as steep as MM's.

At the end of the day, all I want is a good way of connecting flash to the
desktop without doing XML parsing ( sockets ) or text parsing (
projector-based ActiveX style communication ).  Flash remoting is the
answer.  Just got to figure out how to do it (for free!).

Stephen