Today we will be going over the basic setup and configuration of the rapid application framework CakePHP. Actual cakephp development will be covered over a series of tutorials, but for this one, we will be getting the environment ready for future use. It is an easy and simple process, and does not take huge amounts of time. That is the beauty of such frameworks: Rapid Development and Deployment.

Soon, well eventually, the blog is going to get a refresh - and we are currently building that refresh in Drupal, which is an open source CMS. To that end, getting Drupal setup on my machine wasn't particularly a hard procedure, but is slightly complex if you aren't used to setting up a local server and database. So if you fall under that category than this tutorial is for you. First you must know that this tutorial is aimed for Windows users and Drupal 6.X.

The last tutorial on Flex and PHP included some code to send data back and forth from a MySQL database. One of the comments asked a question about sending only the relevant updated data to the server and I decided it would be nice to write a tutorial on how to do this. I am going to build off of the last tutorial for this so if you haven't looked at it I would advise it. Along with only updating the data that changes we are also going to differentiate between an update and delete.

To follow-up on the Flex and PHP tutorial we did earlier I thought it would be nice to do a complete tutorial on php, mysql, flex, and json. This tutorial should show a decent way to send data in a database to and from flex to php using json. I will explain this in more detail in just a moment.