Charlie Key, who helps run a great blog at Paranoid Ferret with some excellent tutorials, has published an article on the Flex developer center about transferring information from Flex to PHP using JSON. A worthwhile read if you're interested in building RIAs with Flex and PHP on the backend.

Someone (I wish people would put their names on blog posts or at least an about page on their blog) has posted a good tutorial on using Flex and PHP together, transferring data using JSON.

In my talk a few days ago, I was asked about the various methods of getting data from PHP to Flex (and vice versa). The options are essentially XML (sometimes called REST), JSON and AMF. XML is the easiest, but also the slowest. If you aren't sending lots of data, you can use that very easily. JSON is fairly easy on the PHP side (its built into PHP 5.2), but requires an open source library called corelib for Flex.

AMF is the fastest solution, but also the most complicated to get started. There are a few options, but the leading candidate right now is WebORB for PHP from the Midnight Coders. Lots of people are using AMFPHP, but the leader of that project recently retired. WebORB for PHP was recently updated to version 2.0, with a ton of improvements in it.

What do you think? Do you agree with my assessment? What are you using in your PHP / Flex application?