Ok, you’ve installed Amfphp, you’ve tested that it’s up and running with the service browser, and now you’re ready to do something real with it.

We’re going to build a service called YourService, with a method called helloWorld. This method shall return a string ‘hello world from the server’.

Then we’re going to build a client that calls this service method, and displays what the server returned.

writing a service

For Amfphp a service is a class that it’s been configured to use as a service. All the methods of this class are exposed as methods of the service. So for our example, you should create a class called YourService, in a file called YourService.php, and put it in the Amfphp/Services folder. This class should contain the method helloWorld which should return the string « hello world from the server ».

Your class should look like this:

<br />class YourService {<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  public function helloWorld(){<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    return 'hello world from the server';<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>  }<br />}<br />

If you go to your service browser you should now see it in the available services. Try it to make sure everything works well on your server.

Now you can write the client code. This depends on which client-side technology you are using, so choose the appropriate part below.

If you get stuck, remember there is the client generator  which can provide you with a full project that calls your helloWorld method.

Flash

In Flash the best way to communicate with Amfphp is with the AMF protocol and the NetConnection object. Furthermore you’ll need a function that can be called when the result is available, and a Responder object.

so here’s the function that is called:

function handleResult(result:Object):void{
  trace("the server said : " + result);
}

you can then create a NetConnection object and a Responder object, connect to your server and call your service:

var netConnection:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
var responder:Responder = new Responder(handleResult, null);
netConnection.connect("http://localhost/Amfphp/index.php");
netConnection.call("YourService/helloWorld", responder);


Flex

The standard way of doing things with a Flex project involves creating an XML file containing information about your server and using it in the compiler options. There are ways to get around this, but as it’s the standard way it will be used here.

In the src folder of your project create a « services-config.xml » file. In it you can put the following:

<br />&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;<br />&lt;services-config&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    &lt;services&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>        &lt;service id="amfphp-flashremoting-service" class="flex.messaging.services.RemotingService" messageTypes="flex.messaging.messages.RemotingMessage"&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>            &lt;destination id="amfphp"&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>                &lt;channels&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>                    &lt;channel ref="amfphp"/&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>                &lt;/channels&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>                &lt;properties&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>                    &lt;source&gt;*&lt;/source&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>                &lt;/properties&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>            &lt;/destination&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>        &lt;/service&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    &lt;/services&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    &lt;channels&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>        &lt;channel-definition id="amfphp" class="mx.messaging.channels.AMFChannel"&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>            &lt;endpoint uri="http://localhost/Amfphp/index.php" class="flex.messaging.endpoints.AMFEndpoint"/&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>        &lt;/channel-definition&gt;<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    &lt;/channels&gt;<br />&lt;/services-config&gt;<br />

Note that the only elements of interest here for our purposes are the url « http://locahost/Amfphp/index.php » and the name of the destination « amfphp ».

Once you’ve got this file, add the following to the compiler options ( project properties->compiler options).
-services services-config.xml
This tells the compiler to include the information contained in the service-config.xml file you just created.

Now onto the code itself. As for Flash, you need a function that is called when the result of the call is available:

<br />function handleResult(event:ResultEvent):void{<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%> Alert.show('the server said : ' + event.result);<br />}<br />

The objects used are slightly different. Here it’s a RemoteObject that we use:

<br />var ro:RemoteObject = new RemoteObject;<br />ro.destination = 'amfphp';<br />ro.source = 'YourService';<br />ro.addEventListener(ResultEvent.RESULT, handleResult);<br />ro.helloWorld();<br />

HTML + Javascript

With HTML + Javascript the best protocol to communicate with Amfphp is JSON. This is because JSON is natively supported by Javascript, whereas AMF is not. If you would like to try AMF with Javascript, there are some available implementations, so give them a try. 
So, you need a function that is called when the call returns:

<br />function onSuccess(data)<br />{<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>	alert('the server said : ' + data);<br />}<br />

and something to make an AJAX call to the server. Here we will use JQuery
You also need something to create your JSON string. You can either do it by hand or use a library to do it for you. Here we create the object describing the call and use the JSON stringify function. Finally, note that the standard JSON content type (application/json) is passed as a GET parameter to make sure the server understands that the data is JSON.

<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>   var callData = JSON.stringify({'serviceName':'YourService', 'methodName':'helloWorld'});<br /><%%KEEPWHITESPACE%%>    $.post('http://locahost/Amfphp/index.php?contentType=application/json', callData, onSuccess);<br />

What’s next?

Once you can return data from Amfphp to your client, try to get some information from a database. Note that you can’t return a PHP resource directly, you have to convert it to an array!

You can find some example code in Examples/Php/ for basic database operations and authentication. Start by reading Examples/Php/readme.txt.