At the Zend PHP Conference 2008, also known as ZendCon, Zend Technologies and Adobe Systems announced plans to collaborate to make Zend's PHP technologies work better with Adobe's user experience technologies.

At the event being held Sept. 15-18 in Santa Clara, Calif., the two companies said they will collaborate to make Zend's PHP tools play nicely with Adobe's Flex technology for building rich internet applications (RIAs). Indeed, the two companies will deliver technologies, content and services to make it easy for enterprise developers to build RIAs using Flex on the client and PHP on the server.

One of the core deliverables of this collaboration is to integrate Adobe's Action Message Format (AMF) support into Zend Framework. AMF is an open, binary, high-speed format enabling Adobe Flash Player and Flex-based client applications to better exchange rich media and other data with servers, Adobe officials said.

Flex is Adobe's open source framework for building and maintaining web applications that deploy across all major browsers and operating systems using Adobe Flash Player and to the desktop via Adobe AIR, company officials said. Zend Framework is an open source PHP application framework. AMF support in Zend Framework delivers optimized communication between server-side Zend Framework components and client-side Adobe Flex components. With the Zend/Adobe collaboration, PHP developers will be able to leverage the fast transfer of data between the server and client tiers of their web applications.

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