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There are a few tutorials out there on the net about using Zend with Flash/Flex but most seem to be overly complicated and many don’t work even after following the instructions. (I am hoping that mine will. ) The next few articles cover a VERY simple implementation that you can build on for use with future projects and I hope it can save people time when it comes to beginning to explore this new method. This post will deal with setting up your environment to be able to use Zend with Flash/Flex.

Code and instructions after the jump.

1. The first thing you need to do is (if you don’t have one already) download and install a local development environment for PHP. (This tutorial is based on WAMP).
2. The instructions for setting up WAMP are pretty self explanatory at their site so I wont go into detail here. At the time of this article I am using Wamp Server 2, PHP 5.3.0, MySQL 5.1.36, and Apache 2.2.11.
3. The next step is to download and install the Zend Framework.
4. Unzip the files to a directory in your WAMP environment. What I did is (under my wamp folder), I created a ‘frameworks’ folder, then a ‘Zend196′ folder and placed the unzipped Zend files there.

   C:\wamp\frameworks\Zend196\library\Zend

5. 

   screenshot of zend folder structure

6. The next thing you need to do is modify your php.ini file so that it includes the Zend framework files. To find your php.ini file, start up WAMP, left click on the icon and select “PHP > php.ini”. Once the file is open, search for ‘include_path’ in the file and add this line:

   include_path = ".;C:\wamp\frameworks\Zend196\library"

That’s it, you should be all set for using Zend with WAMP. Read the next article for how to get data using the Zend Framework with Flex.