Spry: Adobe in Reservoir Dogs Type Stand-Off

May 19th, 2006 "Spry":http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/ oh why oh why? I am of course referring to Adobe's "recently released":http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/pgubbay_spry.html AJAX framework called Spry. See the problem I have with this is Adobe seem to be lining this up directly in comparison to Flex. After Adobe's recent adverts to "Go Beyond AJAX with Flex" they now seem to be hedging their bets by releasing their own framework in an arena with the other "135 other":http://ajaxian.com/archives/134-ajax-frameworks-and-counting frameworks (134 plus the "Google Web Toolkit":http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html). There is now so much choice it's unreal and how many people are going to use Spry over Prototype, DOJO, JSON, Yahoo's web widgets and "all the others":http://ajaxpatterns.org/Ajax_Frameworks. The way I see it Adobe should be 110% behind making Flex 2 a success which is fairly unique in its industry (yes I know about "Laszlo":http://www.laszlosystems.com/ et al.) At the moment they are only diluting their position. The developer community is going to watch them plug each other while they go on hacking around with their favoured AJAX framework. This said, Spry actually looks quite good. It's very much based on loading then manipuling XML datasets and will feel very familar to Flex developers and using it's dynamic region markup does make a page quite readable and succient while other AJAX frameworks require much more effort to understand where the data is coming from and being manipulated. But why would I use it over Flex? In non-Flash based environments? Maybe but then i've got "Prototype":http://prototype.conio.net/ and "Scriptaculous":http://script.aculo.us/for that. Instead what Adobe has done is sow doubt in my mind that they are not 100% sure Flex will suceed.....

Flex and Rails Part 2: Extra Time

May 13th, 2006 In honour of today's FA Cup Final (What a Game!!) here is an extra time on the last tutorial. There was some questions on how to productionise the Flex application. If the flex application is served from the same domain as your Rails application you can modify the HTTPService URLs to just point to your controller with a relative path. From
To
You can then compile the application and move the files from the Flex bin directory into the rails 
public
directory.

RubyOnRails (1.1) and Flex (2.0): Pt 2

May 6th, 2006

UPDATE: Continued from part 1

20 days!! That’s terrible of me, I didn’t mean to be this long in putting up the second part of ths tutorial but work has been madness and I just want to go home and sleep every day.

Still here we are, thanks for everyone who commented on the tutorial especially Mikey Jones for linking to it and Alex MacCaw for taking Up Flex and Rails so enthusiastically.

I think Ruby On Rails is a good choice for your hobbist Flex development, easier to learn for all the Flash Gurus out there and much quicker to learn and robust than PHP.

So in this part i’m going to look at a few new, more advanced things in Flex and some dead simple stuff in Rails. We’re going to do some Flex components, some parameter passing, some ActionScript coding, better Flex form code, some states and some transitions.

So stay awake at the back….

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