I am pleased to inform everyone that my VTC course titled “AIR and PHP Development” is now online!  Please take a look at the free videos and course outline available at VTC.com.  My approach to this course was to walk the viewer through the real-world work of Flex/AIR and PHP development, and the most important goal I have for this course is for you to walk away with new, marketable development skills. One thing I would like to stress is that this course is not just for AIR and PHP development, but also Flex and PHP development.  Many of the code examples and applications can apply to Flex or AIR, and all AIR development is done using Flex Builder and the Flex SDK.

I would like to add a special ‘thank you’ to John Mangino, my project manager at VTC.  He really is an advocate for developers (and a talented developer in his own right).  Thanks in large part to his efforts, VTC’s development courses provide an inexpensive way for developers to gain valuable, in-demand skills and knowledge.

Please contact me if you have any questions about the course!

In an effort to spread as much information as possible on Flash Platform and PHP integration around the Web, I have created the Flash and PHP Development Center.  The URL (flashandphp.com) should be easy enough to remember. And yes, I used the Ahimsa theme there as well because its good and I’m lazy. I have created a few video tutorials to get the site started, and all are available in glorious HD on the high-speed Mosso CDN.  You can also save me a few pennies by viewing them on Vimeo.

I plan to add a lot more over time, but more importantly, I’m hoping to get some help from you.  If you are a developer and have the ability to write articles or do screencasts, please contact me about it.  I would really love to have videos from a wide variety of perspectives.  Besides, you can probably do a better job than I can.  So please don’t hold back.  For those of you who are busy, I would definitely recommend the screencast route.

I will be contacting (read: begging) some of the developers I know and asking them to lend their expertise as well.  To help along in that effort, please hit the blogs of community experts and post comments telling them you want to see them in action on flashandphp.com!

A huge portion of my work involves using 3rd-party payment gateways with Flex applications.  Its always a pain for me to recreate the code to hook up with Authorize.net or PayPal.  Well, it used to be.  I created ActionScript classes to deal with these APIs.  For example, all you have to do to send someone from your Flex app to Authorize.net is to call:

AS3Authorize(54.45);

Where the passed-in value is the amount of your transaction.  The class takes care of the rest, with a little help from as3corelib’s crypto package.  I’m going to walk through the creation of AS3Authorize and a whole lot more in a new VTC MasterClass! on using payment gateway APIs from Flash Platform Apps.  It should be published in a few weeks, and of course I’ll announce that here.

Those of you who are return visitors will notice the very different look I implemented today.  I saw this theme, called Ahimsa, on the WordPress site and I thought it was great.  Big thanks to Ravi Sarma.  I especially like the collapsible sidebar and the links across the top.  Let me know what you think of the new theme!

If you aren’t on board with getMicrophone(), you really should check it out.  Its a community effort to get Adobe to include full access to the microphone’s raw audio stream in Flash apps.  I have always found Adobe and their developers to be responsive and open to community input, so its important that we developers keep up the noise to get this done. Another thing you can do to support this effort is to post your video response on YouTube.  Many of you have already heard all this from Wade Arnold, but he’s right again and it bears repeating.

If you have normal web hosting needs, you probably have a PHP-based website with a MySQL database containing your site content.  You probably also have a bunch of images and maybe some video or a podcast.  If you’re like me, you’re thinking “Surely there’s a cheap way to host the MySQL and HTML.”  You’re right.  Hostmonster is awesome for this purpose, and they host the flexandair blog for $75 per year.  Unlimited transfer, unlimited storage.  How sweet it is.  But when it comes down to brass tacks, the bandwidth just isn’t there.  For larger images, audio, and video, the performance is really kind of frustrating sometimes.  And that is to be expected from a budget host.  For a blog, I’d say “thats life” and move on.  But if you’re running a business, you can’t afford that kind of embarrassment.  But does that mean you have to get a (decent) VPS, or even a dedicated machine?  No.

Break the problem into 2 parts:

PROBLEM 1: I need a cheap way to pull text-based information (HTML, plain text, configuration, links, all that stuff in your MySQL DB).  ANSWER: Hostmonster/GoDaddy/BlueHost is cheap and their servers are killer machines that will rip through your “SELECT `dainty` FROM `little_db` WHERE `info` = ‘noproblem’”.

PROBLEM 2: I need binary files (images, archives, audio, video) to be straight-up blasted to my visitors. I want to crush their faces with a hobnail boot of media.  ANSWER: Cloud, baby.  In my opinion, the cloud is best used like a sledge hammer.  Don’t run an Amazon EC2 instance 24×7 to serve your latest corporate tweets.  Thats $80 per month for…what?  Use a storage cloud.  Using an enterprise storage cloud service will give you access to the carotid artery of the Internet for about 15 cents per gigabyte.  I prefer Mosso to Amazon because they have put forth a lot of effort in developing their APIs and documentation.  The customer service is awesome, and uploads using their management console are free.  Using Mosso puts your files on the LimeLight CDN, and it is fast, fast, fast.  If you’re using a CMS like Joomla! or Drupal, move your logo and template background image to the cloud, and change your links.  Then, move all your images, audio, and video over there too.  It couldn’t be easier with Mosso’s file manager.  You just upload like you would in any webmail account, and they give you a URL where you can access your file on the CDN.  It is a “container” in a subdomain, like Amazon.  Boom.  You’ll be amazed at the speed.  And the bill will probably be less than 30 cents.

OK, so you can actually get the basic VPS from WebKeepers for $6.95, but thats if you buy a year in advance.  If you’re like me, you aren’t about to shell out for a year without putting the product to the test.  When I signed up for Webkeepers, I looked for an honest review on their service.  I didn’t find one.  So, I wanted to put in my 2 cents on them.

WebKeepers is awesome.  The price, month-to-month, is $10.  You guys may have already used WebKeepers, because all of my pdf2swf conversions take place on my super-cheap VPS.  I have had some downtime, but every time that happens, I get a prompt email from WebKeepers, and the problem is fixed in a hurry.  So, its a great value for $10.  If you have been wanting to run something super cool but couldn’t because your host wouldn’t let you, I would definitely recommend a VPS from WebKeepers.  I don’t know how well they would scale for more serious purposes, but for doing development work and publishing demos, its great.

So, I’ve finished recording my VTC series, “AIR and PHP Development,” and its now in the hands of my VTC project manager, John Mangino.  You can follow the title’s progress as well as others in the works at his blog.  It ended up closer to 12 hours, and as I’ve said earlier, it contains some really neat stuff.  I particularly enjoyed doing the chapter on local SQLite databases and remote sychronization.  Its a really cool feature and surprisingly easy to implement.  I have to put a plug in here for the microphone I used in the videos, the MXL 007.  It’s an amazing piece of equipment.  I think I spent around $100 for it on buy.com, about $40 more than the headset I was considering.  But I can tell you its worth every penny.  No mysterious hums or hisses, excellent levels (even at the low and mid-gain settings), and crystal-clear audio reproduction.  And its USB, so you get it powered up and its ready to go on PC or Mac, totally plug-and-play.  Also plays nice with all my software: Camtasia, ScreenFlow, Soundbooth, and Audacity.

Now that my rig is at least respectable, I might do some more videos for CRUDdy Buddy or Zend_Amf.  Drop me a line if you want to see something in particular.

I am pleased to tell everyone that I will be doing the VTC video training series titled “AIR and PHP Development.”  I am wrapping up the recordings today and tomorrow, and then they will be edited by the gifted VTC team.  After that, you’ll be able to purchase the whole 11-hour-or-so series standalone or through a VTC subscription.  Many of you have read my posts on VTC’s amazing course offerings before, but I just want to reiterate what an excellent resource it is.  I find that video tutorials are the best way for me to learn, and if you are the same way, do yourself a favor and look through their course catalog.  I certainly hope you’ll watch my course, but I can also personally vouch for their videos on Flex Builder, Ruby, Java, and C.  And the PHP project solutions series is awesome too.

I’ve decided to set up a public API to convert PDFs to SWFs.  I figured that most of you want to play with the PDF-AVM2 conversion and see it in action before going through the whole setup yourselves, and thats what the API is for.

Basically, you just send your PDF file and API key to my Linux VPS, and when the conversion is done you’ll get the URL (a string) of the resulting AVM2 SWF. You can download this Flex Builder AIR project, plug in your API key on line 47, and you’re ready to go.

You have to sign up for the API key.  All you have to enter is your email address (doesn’t have to be real, but please leave your real one in case I need to update you).  Just go to the signup page and fill it out.  Let me know if you have any issues.

UPDATE: In case anyone was wondering, I don’t care how much you use the API, as long as the volume doesn’t bring down the server.  I think you should be fine doing up to 60-80 documents per day.