Calling fcsh as a service from PHP

Hi,

I have only being playing with Flex for about a week, so please excuse my ignorance. Being in the educational arena, I think it is very useful to be able to make simple, non-graded online quizzes/tutorials. As a result, I have been working on making it simple to create this type of application using Flex. What I have done so far is to write a couple of Python scripts that will take a text input file (structured in a way that is easy to process), and produce a .mxml file that can be compiled into the Flash application (.swf file). The script also creates a .html file that can be used as a wrapper for the .swf file.

After creating the .mxml file, I have been using mxmlc to compile to the .swf file. I have been using the Flex SDK (not Flex Builder) for this, as I can just create a shell script to automate the process. This works fine for me, as I know how to create the text input file and can do so with any text editor. The result is very simple (not tied to any database) as these are intended to be non-graded quizzes (that possibly prepare students for graded quizzes and exams). I would like to make this available to other faculty (and perhaps even students for certain courses). However, it is easy to get the input file structure incorrect for anyone that is not familiar with how the process works.

My first attempts to try to make it easier to create the input file involved using PHP to create a web-interface to create the input file. Creating the appropriate forms and writing the input file is not hard, but I wanted to also compile the .mxml file and make the resulting .swf file available for download. This is where I run into problems. I have not been able to get the mxmlc compiler work via PHP's exec() function. (The Python scripts run fine using exec().) After searching around on the Web, I learned about the fcsh environment. Unlike mxmlc, fcsh loads the Java code into memory and so fcsh will run a lot faster after the first run.

I know that some people are running fcsh as a daemon. I was wondering if any of you have any experience running fcsh this way, and if I would be able to call it from within PHP. If this is possible, this would make the process go much faster (and I wouldn't need as powerful a server to drive the site).

Just in case anyone is interested, I have attached an input file and the resulting .swf file.