One of the new features of Flash Builder 4 is the inclusion of the DCD workflows, or Data Centric Development to give it it’s full title; which allows for easy integration and wiring up of data from various server solutions. This new feature has peaked my interest by the fact that the DCD for PHP utilizes the Zend_AMF from within Zend framework. Something I hadn’t played around with too much.
I’m used to consuming data in Flash via remote objects through various AMF implementations; but I hadn’t played with Zend_AMF or the full Zend framework stack. So while front-end communication via AMF hadn’t changed for me – per se, I still had the issue of working with / learning the Zend framework for the actual server application development.
After reading a lot of documentation I discovered that there was a command line tool that took some of the heavy lifting out of setting up and developing with the Zend framework, and I’m all for automation. So I hunted around Google for a bit to see if anyone had hooked this in to Eclipse – fortunately for me someone had, unfortunately it wasn’t as flexible as I wanted so I put my fiddling hat on to see if I could improve on. If you’d like to see how I got on you can read the full step-by-step article here.
