Possible to use FB4.5 for PHP without Zend Studio?

Question

I've watched a really helpful tutorial on FB4.5 for PHP by Mihai Corlan and am hoping to use some of his techniques but would like to use a different PHP server because Zend Server costs money and I'd rather avoid polluting my workstation with still more daemon-type services.  I've set up numerous Debian and CentOS servers from scratch and would like to configure FB4.5 for PHP so that I can debug both my Actionscript and PHP.  Has anyone done this?  I could certainly used advice from someone who's gone through all the trouble already. I'd very much like to capitalize on all of the ways that FB4.5 automatically generates code and creates links for you rather than writing all that stuff by hand.

Answer 1

There may be other ways to do this but I built a flex 3/php web site winter 2008 on a Rackspace based server.  PHP is the standard configuration of the cloud server offerings and I have NO maintenance with the server.  It just runs.  I only program the PHP and client side (Flex for pc and AJAX for Mobile).   At the time I looked at Zend (cost money as noted), BlaseDS, AMFPHP and straight dumb text transfers.  Zend, BlaseDS, AMFPHP are all AMF and at least for me were a little tricky to get configured correctly and maintain during development (I would usually break something and have to debug which is harder for me in AMF).  I quickly decided to just use straight text transfers and create my own protocal with concat and decode on both sides.  You use RPC with POST settings.  It was easy to put in print statements for debugging whatever I was breaking at the time (client commands, comm channel, server command processing, MySQL interaction) and I could always see exactly what was breaking when related to the comm channel. 
So for me, Zend and BlaseDS are hard to set up and maintain during development.  AMFPHP was easy to set up and sometimes tricky to debug when things went south.  RPC POST text transfers are easy to set up and debug data streams.  If you look at the cookbook section of adobe flex and search for any of the above, you will get an ap note or 2 discussing how to set up and a simple usage example.
One last point was after I got done with the pc version of my web site, I started to do a browser based mobile solution for a trimmed down version of the web site.  It turns out, since I was implementing in AJAX, I could not figure out how to do AMF type transfers and the text based comm channel easy enabled the client side to change from Flex to AJAX but the server side stayed untouched.  It greatly reduced my development.  The pc version took about 2.5 man years (70+ main views) and the mobile version took on 3 weeks (15 main views)!
All of the above comments assume you are developing a web site that just uses the server as a data wearhouse.  The solution may be different if you are mostly a streaming based web site (streaming off your own server).
Good luck on your choices!