When it was announced a while back that Zend was going to include AMF (Action Message Format) functionality supported by Adobe, I was excited to hear that there would be an "official" way to use AMF with PHP, as I had used AMFPHP, an unsupported implementation, with mixed success. I experimented with Zend AMF a little when it was released, and there were two things that annoyed me about this implementation as compared with AMFPHP, but I revisited it this week and discovered remedies for both issues.
My first issue was the size of the code library. The full Zend Framework is around 27mb, while AMFPHP weighed in at 1.4mb. I had read that you didn't need the whole framework to use Zend AMF, but couldn't find details on how to slim it down. This week I found a link that offered the ability to download only Zend AMF. I downloaded and installed, but when I navigated to my gateway in a browser, I was greeted with an error claiming a necessary class could not be found. I found this class in the full Zend directory and copied it over to my Zend AMF install, worried that I was embarking down what could be an endless road of error, copy files, repeat. This road only ended up being one directory and one file long, and then I had Zend AMF working at a slim 754kb. I ended up needing to move the Loader directory and the Auth.php file to get it working. I am not sure why these were left out of the Zend AMF download.
My second issue was the lack of a service browser app like the one included with AMFPHP. My new friend Garth alerted me to the fact that one of the guys over at almer/blank in Los Angeles had recently released a service browser for Zend AMF in the form of an AIR application called ZamfBrowser. It works great so far, and even lets you easily send custom objects as parameters to the remote methods, something that was more difficult with the AMFPHP version. My only suggestion at this point would be the addition of a 'Refresh' button to allow the services to reload after making a change to the code.
