RailsConf Europe - Wednesday Sessions - 1

September 19th, 2007

Trying to make better choices today which shouldn’t be too hard. So I decided on following up my Flex on Rails background (which I havn’t be exploring recently), but since I was the first tutorial on integrating Flex and Rails, I thought i’d check on it’s progress.

Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Ruby on Rails

This session was given by Simeon Bateman, who although not Adobe is certainly a Flex expert and has real world in-anger experience of Flex and Rails.

Unfortunately Simeon spent far too much time on Flash background and had some problems with the Internet before getting to the good stuff. But did manage to quick demonstrations of

To his credit the last 15 mins was some of the best and explained the advantages of AMF over HTTPService with great examples. Simeon reckons that RubyAMF is the way to go in the future as WebORB has not been updated in a year, other people I know concur with that.

The other question for people interested in Flash/Flex is:

What is Thermo?

Creating Hybrid Web and Desktop Applications with Rails and Slingshot

A session by Joyent on Slingshot. This is something i’ve had an interest in for a while, in the realms of the online/offline applications. In theory Slingshot offers downloadable Rails applications that run on the desktop but syncs with an online web-application.

It will do syncronisations, and you can extend the sync-hooks and will need to implement aggregate_data for your models to get the sync works. But it won’t do conflict resolutions, but it does handle auto-increment ids and foreign-key problems on the syncronisation side which is a pretty tough problem. It can also sync files as well as data between online and offline. You must have timestamps on your model to sync models which make sense.

I will do some drag and drop stuff but only on Mac OS X. This is a real problem, and certainly AIR could overtake easily in this area. I would like to see how I could get RailsDAV working with Slingshot on this.

Your code will be visible in the download, it is after all Ruby. So it better be open-source application on a behind firewall deployment. I don’t think this is this biggest problem as people won’t be able to copy it without the web-application component.

They downloads can be big. 20MB is the initial hit and applications can be as big as 100MB.

Overall it seems better on Mac OSX than Windows. It has DMG packaging, XCode customisation and changing Info.plist while the Windows deployment looks a lot harder.

In practice, its not complete. Here is a list of things it won’t do (Yet)

But this is still one of the most interesting and innovative things being talked about at RailsConf Europe so was certainly worth intending. The presentation was well done and paced well, including presentation then questions then demo which is a lot to fill 45 minutes. Showing you don’t have to aim your presentation at the lowest common demoninator.

I’m wondering if you could just use the sync_controller parts of slingshot and write an AIR end…. Evil but useful.

Great demo..

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