Developers taking the course will get a first hand look at Flex - the actual application delivering the material was recently rewritten with Flex. As well, the August issue of PHP Architect magazine has an article about creating a chat application with Flex and PHP. Finally, there's a talk about Flex and PHP at their PHP Works conference in Atlanta, from November 12th - 14th.

Flex developer who use PHP on the server have had a lot of great news lately. Andi Gutmans blogged about Adobe supporting the Zend Framework by providing AMF support to the Zend Framework just a few weeks ago.

Adobe is looking for Adobe Student Reps for RIAs. Adobe Student Reps receive community recognition, speaking opportunities in some Adobe sponsored events, access to Adobe resources (presentation slides, information posters, contact with AIR and Flex team) and some funding available for approved events. If you are a passionate about RIAs and willing to help your classmates to know more about RIA technologies, you should consider joining this program. This is a great opportunity to get to know the Adobe team and to network with other reps.

The application form is available here. Note that you must be registered and logged onto flex.org to view and fill this form.

Help us continue to be the best by staying connected on the Flex Open Source site and contributing in the various ways we have listed.

We are offering a free limited edition t-shirt to the first 500 people who upgrade to Flex Builder 3 starting August 1, 2008. Hurry and purchase the upgrade from the Adobe store to get your t-shirt. We hope that this will give you the extra push to upgrade soon and have access to the latest features of Flex Builder and the Flex framework.

Note that you must purchase the upgrade from the Adobe store to be eligible for this offer. After you purchase the upgrade, you will receive an email giving you further instructions on how you can specify the gender and size for the t-shirt.

The proposal gives PHP developers an Adobe sponsored AMF project, bringing AMF interoperability closer to what is available for ColdFusion and Java developers. (Adobe released the AMF specification in December of 2007.)

Wade Arnold, who runs the AMFPHP project, is leading the Zend Framework work for Adobe.

For PHP developers who aren’t using the Zend Framework, there are other AMF solutions available, including AMFPHP, WebORB for PHP, SabreAMF and a native PHP extension called AMFEXT.

Andi Gutmans, CTO of Zend, has a few more details on his blog. We’re really excited to be joining the Zend Framework family – joining IBM, Google, Microsoft and others who are contributing to the framework.

Adobe is a platinum sponsor of the Zend Conference, September 15 – 18 in Santa Clara. We'll have a few sessions there that will talk about this new Zend Framework component.

Flex in a Week is a week-long, video based online training program for developers. This self-paced program is free and is intended to help developers accelerate their Flex learning. The training will eventually be a full 5-day program, however we are launching with the first three days which will provide developers with enough learning to get them started using Flex. We will complete the remaining two days of content over the coming weeks.

Please help us promote this valuable new training resource by blogging about it and by including a link in your email signatures. This program should play a key role in increasing Flex adoption.

We are also looking for feedback. Please let us know what you think of this training.

If you're looking for Flex training, Lynda.com is a great spot to start. Adobe has recently made some free Flex video training available on the Flex developer center, and Total Training is another great resource.

Check out This Week in Flex on the AdobeFlexTV YouTube channel, which includes her weekly videos, and other good Flex and AIR videos that she's found on YouTube for you.

This Week in Flex Episode 3:

This Week in Flex Episode 2:

Enjoy!

• An updated overview on the themes of the release
• A recorded presentation by Matt outlining the release
• A whitepaper describing the updated component architecture
• Specifications for a number of features

Additionally, we have pushed a whole bunch of source into the public repository. We had kept it private partly because it was using Flash Player 10 which we couldn't talk about for a while, and partly because there was a huge amount of churn and we wanted to have the whitepaper and other presentations ready so that everything would make sense.

We hope you'll peruse at your leisure and talk to us about it on the open source forums!

Note: the first nightly build using all the new stuff may not be available until tomorrow.

The new site features Flex focused content aggregated from a number of sources. For news, we get information from Digg or DZone's flash-flex tag. We aggregate job information from SearchCoders, RIAJobs.org, FlexGigs and Dice.com. We aggregate podcasts from the Flex Show and RIA Weekly.

Community members can add their own components, themes and other software to the site. User group members can add their own user groups to the site, and anyone can add events to the site, such as upcoming Flex Camp events, training events, user group meetings, and conferences. Finally, the site also has a list of Flex consultants that are available to help with Flex development.

There are a few RSS feeds that you can subscribe to from the site. The main RSS feed has a list of Flex news and information from around the web. The Flex Jobs RSS feed has a list of Flex jobs available. The Flex Podcast and Videocast RSS feed has a list of Flex focused podcasts and videocast episodes. Finally, the Flex Showcase RSS feed continues to highlight cool Flex applications that developers are building and adding to Flex.org.