Mike Potter

January 30, 2007

Flash, Flex and PHP Just Got A Huge Boost

Using Flash and Flex with a PHP backend just got a whole lot faster. Patrick Mineault, who runs the AMFPHP project, has released a new version of AMFPHP 1.9, beta 2 now. However, the real big news in his blog post was the news that there is now a C based AMF extension for PHP. According to his tests, this is up to 100% faster than using the PHP version of the AMFPHP library. In fact, his tests show that it takes less than 1 second to encode and send 100,000 array elements, each containing an object with 3 fields (7.3 MBs of data). Head over to his blog to read more about it.

Posted by Mike Potter at 11:28 AM on January 30, 2007

Comments

Pete Mackie — 08:46 AM on February 03, 2007

To add this code to Xnix platforms requires a recompile of the PHP scripting engine. I see this as a barrier to wide deployment of this capability.

Many PHP developers run their Web servers on the $5 to $20 per month virtual servers that a handful of national ISPs provide. You can observe this notion by the server platform deployment question on the WebORB for PHP forum. (A few ISPs are even stuck with only supporting PHP 4.x, heaven forbid.) These Web server platforms are Xnix in based, with the majority being Linux. These ISPs cannot / will not be bothered with a recompile of PHP to support the addition of a new and unproven C module. In a nutshell, even if this addition is really a killer improvement, widely available Web server platforms to support the enhancement may not be available for many Flex 2 / PHP developers.

menak — 11:32 AM on March 08, 2007

As an small ISP I agree with the former post. Deploying the system in a virtual hosting environment is tough. We do support old PHP 4, but most of our customers moved to PHP 5. Still the TCO does rise quite a bit due to service time to recompile PHP everytime a PHP update is required. So this is a major drawback for us even though the possiblities are astonishing.

menak — 11:37 AM on March 08, 2007

As an small ISP I agree with the former post. Deploying the system in a virtual hosting environment is tough. We do support old PHP 4, but most of our customers moved to PHP 5. Still the TCO does rise quite a bit due to service time to recompile PHP everytime a PHP update is required. So this is a major drawback for us even though the possiblities are astonishing.

menak — 11:39 AM on March 08, 2007

As an small ISP I agree with the former post. Deploying the system in a virtual hosting environment is tough. We do support old PHP 4, but most of our customers moved to PHP 5. Still the TCO does rise quite a bit due to service time to recompile PHP everytime a PHP update is required. So this is a major drawback for us even though the possiblities are astonishing.

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