I’m currently writing a chapter on amfphp in an upcoming book on Open Source Flash to be published at Friends of Ed. Much of the chapter is going to be geared towards mini-projects as I feel amfphp really isn’t that complicated and people learn much better with an actual live example than with abstract discussions on architecture and security.

Now the key thing is that I have only about 20 pages left for projects, and I’d like to cover Flash and Flex, so it’s going to be tight. There are many aspects I want to make sure these projects talk about: sending mail, saving bitmaps, doing CRUD, authentication, etc. Some ideas that come to mind include:

• CRUD scenario: something simple, like an address book, simple message board, guestbook, mini-blog, etc.
• Email form including inline spell check (perhaps using the above address book)
• “Fun” scenario: perhaps something involving flickr, webcams, drawing or whatever, preferably something that doesn’t use AS2 components, and perhaps using ImageMagick or GD…
• PhpMyAdmin-like app (in Flex)
• Something involving Treemaps or linked resources, maybe a webpage links analyzer with a graph view or something, in Flex

I could probably write a whole book on just the above ideas, but right now I only have a single chapter ;) So I’ve narrowed it down to a single “visual shout” scenario with three self-contained projects:

• Add shout page (in Flash): essentially, a form with name, email and message, in addition to a webcam viewer. There will be a snapshot button for the webcam. Clicking “send” sends the data and the webcam image to the server to be saved in a database, in addition to sending a notification email.
• View shouts page (in Flash): A series of tiles, with the webcam image, the name and the message underneath it. Includes a paging mechanism.
• Admin shouts (in Flex): A datagrid with filtering and delete, edit mechanisms. Authenticated.

What do you think? Can you come up with a better scenario given all the constraints? Am I not going over some key aspect of amfphp that you want covered? Can you write the chapter for me while I do my general relativity paper :D ? Comments appreciated.