Hey all,
Is anyone here using Flex with Rails?
what are you looking to do with flex?
I haven’t started flex with rails but I use it with coldfusion.
Robert D. wrote:
Hey all,
Is anyone here using Flex with Rails?
I have this page bookmarked from the Adobe Developer Center:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex2_rails.html
Don’t currently do anything with Flex and Rails…
Mike
Yeah you just pass XML back and forth. I haven’t built flex stuff
myself but I’ve done a bit of work building Ruby on Rails backends for
Flex apps. It’s dead simple.
Cam
This is little of the main issue here but a little tip from experience
regarding the data flow between Flex and server side.
We develop a Flex client that is very extensive on data consumption.
Our experience is that among all tested protocols the JSON is the
fastest one.
The Xml is OK but transformation from it to Flex objects is better if
you use JSON.
We have our server side in C#, Php and naturally in Rails.
John,
Thanks for the quick response. I am looking to build a complete UI in
Flex and the backend in Rails. Any links you can provide are welcomed.
Thanks for the point in the right direction.
Robert
Hi Robert,
yes I am 
It’s straight forward and with Flex as GUI ist really easy to have a
RichInternetApplication
with features that DHTML/JavaScript simply can not achieve.
Best regards
Chris
and then to take it one step farther. . .
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
“Adobe® AIR™, formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating
system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web
development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to
the desktop.”
John
Thank you all for your help. I have visited all provided links, and
have been looking into AIR as well. I have found a great (and
inexpensive) PDF as well. Here is the link to it (http://
www.flexiblerails.com/). Thanks again.
There’s also a pretty nice plugin for Rails - WebOrb… does a lot of
the
translation. I actually worked with one of the developers on a project
last
and he’s very cool.
http://www.themidnightcoders.com/weborb/rubyonrails/index.htm
Thanks Brian. I hae seen WebOrb before - it looked pricey for
commercial applications.
- Robert
Yeah… but there’s an open-source version, at least there was last time
I
checked,
If you haven’t already found it, there is the Google group
http://groups.google.com/group/adobe-rubyonrails-ria-sdk
The blog http://flexonrails.net/ has some good info too.
Good luck.
Hi Robert,
Look at flexonrails.net for WebORB articles, and at
http://www.themidnightcoders.com/weborb/rubyonrails/index.htm.
-Peter
Do you have a link. That would rock.
Also, when receiving XML from a RESTful Rails controller, is there a
certain format that Flex expects? I am having issues and Rails is
returning the proper XML, however I am not sure that Flex is getting
it properly formatted. Any help would be great. Thanks.
Robert
Is WebORB a “better” way to go than accessing Rails via REST?
- Robert
On Jun 16, 12:51 pm, “Peter A.” [email protected]id
Robert D. <[email protected]…> writes:
On Jun 14, 10:09 pm, “John I.” <john.ivan…@…> wrote:
Is anyone here using Flex with Rails?
Hi Robert,
yes, I am about to build a an app with these components (Flex and Rails)
and the first experiences are good
It’s easy to combine them with Rails restful features and with Flex
HTTPRequest
and the events.
Seems to me a prefect combination because you can do much more on the
GUI side.
Best regards
Chris
It is different.
Whether it is “better” depends on your requirements. REST lets you
support traditional HTML views (and HTML + AJAX) with the same Rails
controllers that talk to Flex (typically with XML). Note, however,
that the Flex + RESTful Rails combination is not tied to XML: you can
also use JSON (see
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2006/03/28/tutorial-using-json-with-flex-2-and-actionscript-3
for details). In my Flexible Rails book [www.flexiblerails.com] I am
only using XML for now with RESTful controllers, but I am considering
adding an iteration which replaces the XML with JSON, just to show the
difference. Furthermore, it should be fairly straightforward to
implement support for YAML as well.
WebORB uses AMF, which is a binary protocol. There are pros and cons
to this. Also, WebORB is not MIT-licensed [like Rails] or
LGPL-licensed [like JBoss]–it is currently available under two
licenses: a commercial license and the GPL. Whether you need a
commercial license or can use the GPL version depends on what you are
doing. The GPL is not the same thing as the LGPL. I’m not a lawyer,
so I won’t comment further.
-Peter
Thanks all. So far, Peter’s book is rockin the house with Flex +
Rails. Now I just need some more Flex training and I am off to the
races.
Nice! Thanks.