RubyOnRails (1.1) and Flex (2.0): Pt 1
April 16th, 2006
UPDATE: Part 2 of the tutorial can be found here
Some close friends of mine are dangerously good flash developers. In a recent pub meet-up I said I had some ideas on integrations between Ruby On Rails and Adobe’s new Flex framework.
Now I know that Ruby On Rails is all integrated with some cool AJAX features (I’m loving those RJS templates right now) but Flex does offer something different.
For the un-informed, Flex allows you to build Rich Internet Applications, defined in XML and delivered on the Flash player. Let’s set one thing straight Flex is Free The SDK and compiler cost nothing. Adobe are making the dough on the IDE Flex Builder and some of the harder core Java integration features.
So where does Rails come in to this. Well Flex can consume and publish to XML based URL services to create dynamic applications with a rich client. Rails1.1 has some great REST features which make it a truely rapid development backend for Flex applications.
So without much more ado here is the first part of a tutorial on integrating RubyOnRails and Flex. This is the simplest thing that works tutorial. The Part 2 tutorial is going to cover some more advanced integrations.
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