I'm teaching myself PHP. I wanted to use that new "baby SQL" that's built into PHP5 rather than MySQL, as it looks just as good and an order of magnitude simpler. My webspace provider, however, is still on PHP4 with the thinking that PHP5 breaks existing code (which it apparently does), so they can't start breaking other sites, go figure.

Thus far, it seems pretty straightforward. The Ghostwire PHPobject component makes the "communication between Flash and PHP" part pretty dirt-simple. There's also AMFPHP, which is a free PHP-written knockoff of Flash Remoting. It's compatible with the Flash components' communication model, but it's more complicated. We'll see.