I'd like to work on amfext

I'm a fairly experienced PHP Developer. I have written FlashMOG ( http://flashmog.net) and I wanted to utilize amfext ( http://pecl.php.net/package/amfext) to see if I could squeeze better performance but there are problems with amfext. It cannot properly unserialize information serialized by current versions of Flash Player. I'd like to take over as maintainer of this project as the current maintainer has indicated they are looking for a new one ( http://www.teslacore.it/wiki/index.php?title=AMFEXT#Status). My C chops are quite rusty but I'm dedicated to improving amfext. I was looking around for some resources on PHP extension development and found the page on PECL that lets you sign up for an account so I'm here to introduce myself. Hi! At any rate, if anyone has suggestions about how to set up the dev environment, I'd sure appreciate it. Between the source code being scattered all over and the phpize/configure steps, I'm not particularly sure how to get this code running in Eclipse or XCode.