I've got a bit of research left before I get fully underway, but I've been reading through info about the AMFPHP open source Flash Remoting gateway . Cool beans. I don't want to pay for Flash Remoting stuff from Macrodobe since I'm generally not cash-filled and FR is huge-o expensivo to implement from what I've seen.

I have much research about other options that are less expensive than the real thing, but I'm not getting into that. This is my journal, after all, and I'm only up to AMFPHP right now. I'll get the others posted when I get to them, eh?

Here's a clip from their home page, in case you need more info before leaving here:

It’s fast, reliable, 100% free and open-source. Flash Remoting is a technology built into the Flash player core that enables sending data between the server and the client seemlessly. If you've built XML-based RIAs you know how much of a pain it can be to serialize the data, debug, and integrate into your application.With Flash Remoting, you can call remote methods from the Flash client and the arguments will end up in the native remote language, and will come back to Flash correctly typed, so there's no messing with serialization at all.

You also get to use the wonderful NetConnection debugger, which shows you exactly what's being sent between the client and server. Remoting uses AMF, a very lightweight binary format that cuts the bulk out of packets, meaning data exchange is a lot faster than with XML. All in all, Remoting is the way to go if you're looking to build robust, fast and secure Rich Internet Applications.

AMFPHP is a complete implementation of Remoting for PHP with tons of features built-in to make creating Remoting apps a whole lot simpler.

Here's a tutorial that I'm going through along with a few other docs and some books I already own with Remoting info in them:

• Connecting Macromedia Flash and PHP