Kevin from Adobe presenting Flash Builder 4 with the Zend Framework

Arranged by the New York PHP group, Kevin Hoyt from Adobe spoke at IBM’s New York City office yesterday about the new Adobe Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder) coming out later this year.  He showed the new features specifically for PHP developers, and how Flex can integrate easily with the Zend framework for building rich Internet applications quickly.

Because Adobe and Zend Technologies formed a strategic partnership, Flash Builder 4 has a whole bunch of new features especially suitable for enterprise and data-centric PHP development.  This includes the newly made support for Adobe Action Message Format (AMF) through the Zend_Amf module now in the Zend Framework, which enables high-speed data transfer between the client and server.  We also learned about a great tool called ServiceCapture that monitors AMF activity among other things, helping Rich Internet Application developers debug, analyze, and test their applications.

In addition, we looked at some other significant improvements to Flex 4 – most notably the separation of function from design, just like with CSS.  With this new “Spark architecture”, a developer can now build an application just once, and then a designer can create multiple skins for various devices and/or contexts for that application without having to touch or modify the underlying code related to the functionality.  This is progress.  You can learn more about this in detail here.