Right on the heels of Lee Brimelow’s recent AMFPHP tutorial, it appears Zend will be adding support for AMFPHP. As reported by Brimelow on The Flash Blog:

It is good timing to tell you that AMF will soon be coming to the Zend Framework. Much like AMFPHP, the proposed Zend_Amf component will make communication between Flash and PHP lightining fast.

Yesterday, Lee Brimelow mentioned Action Message Format (AMF) on The Flash Blog. I’ve read a little about this topic, but know next to nothing about it. Here’s the official word from Adobe:

AMF is a compact binary format that is used to serialize ActionScript object graphs. Once serialized an AMF encoded object graph may be used to persist and retrieve the public state of an application across sessions or allow two endpoints to communicate through the exchange of strongly typed data.

Basically, it’s a way to more efficiently pass large amounts of information between Flash and the server (i.e., an alternative to XML). Brimelow outlined several server-side methods to utilize this format and promised some real-world examples next week. Jump over to The Flash Blog to read up on Action Message Format.

Download the AMF 3 Specification PDF

Update: Brimelow is on the ball; the first AMF/AMFPHP tutorial is already up over at gotoAndLearn(). Happy coding.