Flextrine

Flextrine is a powerful solution for creating Flex/PHP rich internet applications currently providing a persistence API and remote method invokation. The ultimate goal of Flextrine is to provide a similar feature set as LiveCycle Data Services for the Flex/PHP developer.

Documentation is available in the wiki. The Flextrine discussion group is on Google Groups. Please log bugs and requests in issues.

Requirements

• Flex 3, Flex 4
• PHP 5.3+
• MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle (more coming)

Features

Here are some of the features provided by Flextrine.

Object persistence

Flextrine gives you a very powerful asynchronous client-server ORM (object-relational mapper) directly within Flex itself with full support for associations, relations, complex queries, lazy loading and inheritance.

Data binding

Flextrine is built from the ground up to respect Flex data-binding, and you can bind entities and collections to Flex components and trust that they will automatically update whenever data is reloaded or resynchronized.

One row, one object

Flextrine puts a lot of work into ensuring that you only ever have a single instance of an AS3 object for each row in the database. This means that you can persist, update and remove objects knowing that all objects in your application will respect the changes.

Multi-client syncronisation

Flextrine has been designed from the ground up to support real-time multi-client updates through Remote Shared Objects using a media server such as Flash Media Server, Wowza or Red5. This will eventually be used provide features similar to LiveCycle Data Service's real-time DataSource component.

How does it work?

Flextrine is actually a Flex frontend onto Doctrine 2, a powerful ORM system for PHP. Doctrine performs the persistence heavy-lifting, and Flextrine manages the communications, local object caches, instance management and client side lazy/eager loading strategies.

This sounds complicated! Why do I care?

Well, its like this. The following code creates a Customer and saves it to the database:

var myCustomer:Customer = new Customer();
myCustomer.name = "Joe Bloggs";

em.persist(myCustomer);
em.flush();

Well... that was surprisingly short. Surely there is a load of PHP on the other side to make this work?

<?php
/**
 * @Entity
 */
class Customer {

	/** @Id @Column(type="integer") @GeneratedValue(strategy="IDENTITY") */
	public $id;

	/** @Column(length=100, type="string") */
	public $name;

}

Amazing! I want to use this in all my Flex RIA projects

Flextrine is released under the GPLv3 licence. This means that you are free to use Flextrine in a project free of charge as long as you or your client are happy to make the full source code for that project available. If you want to use Flextrine in a closed-source project please contact me through my blog at http://www.actionscriptdeveloper.co.uk/contact/ to discuss licencing.