Flex on Rails : Building Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex 3 and Rails 2

"Therers"s no question yours"re going to be a better Flex and Rails developer when yours"re done reading this book." From the Foreword by Matt Chotin, Senior Product Manager, Adobe Systems, Inc. Adobe Flex enables the rapid development of rich and engaging user experiences. Ruby on Rails dramatically simplifies the development of database-driven web applications. Now therers"s a book that shows how to use the newest versions of both frameworks together to create state-of-the-art Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Flex on Railsbegins with the absolute essentials: setting up your environment for Flex and Rails, passing data with XML, and integrating Flex front-ends with Rails back-ends. Then, using practical, easy-to-understand code examples, the authors take you from the basics to advanced topics only discussed in this book. Techniques covered here include Constructing sophisticated interfaces that canrs"t be created with AJAX alone Using RESTful services to expose applications for access via APIs Testing Flex and Rails together Using Flex Frameworks Getting Flex into your build/deploy process And morehellip; The authors also offer practical introductions to powerful complementary technologies, such as RubyAMF and Juggernaut. Written by developers with extensive experience using both frameworks, this book covers the new Adobe Flex 3 and Ruby on Rails 2 from the ground up. Even if you have minimal experience with Flex or Rails, yours"ll learn all you need to know to use them to build exceptional production applications.

Tony Hillerson is a Software Architect for EffectiveUI. He graduated from Ambassador University with a BA in MIS. On any given day, he may be working with Flex, Java, Rails, Maven, Ant, Ruby, Rake, Capistrano, or shell scripts. Tony maintains RubyAMF, a Rails plug-in that allows Flex applications to pass AMF messages to and from Rails. Tony has been a speaker at 360Flex, Adobe MAX, and RailsConf, as well as local user groups. In his nonexistent free time, Tony enjoys playing the bass, playing World of Warcraft, making electronic music, brewing beer, learning Latin, and studying philosophy. Tony lives outside Denver, Colorado with his wife and son, Titus.

Daniel Wanja, a native of Switzerland, currently lives in Denver, Colorado. He has lived in Denver for more than six years with his wife and three children, ages 5, 3, and 5 months. Daniel is a dynamic, skilled enterprise software architect and developer with over 20 years’ experience. He has worked in the banking, insurance, and high-tech industries around the world delivering mission-critical software. Daniel is president and part owner of two Flex and Ruby on Rails consulting agencies, Nouvelles Solutions, Inc., in Denver, http://n-so.com, and ProDesign Sarl in Geneva, Switzerland, http://prodesign.ch. Daniel started the http://onrails.org blog on Ruby on Rails and related matters in 2005.

Preface PrefaceIn 2004 yet another framework for making websites appeared. It was called Ruby on Rails, and when web and enterprise developers who had never heard of Ruby before started to work with it, they discovered that it wasn't like all the others. Why?Rails offers the promise of fewer configuration files, less boilerplate code, less red tape, and, most of all, the promise of having fun again while programming. Rails was designed to make development more about getting common development tasks done by following conventions, not offering endless flexibility for the remote possibility of connecting up with any number of hypothetical legacy back-ends sometime in the future. By taking away unnecessary choices and offering simple solutions for common problems, Rails lets developers focus on writing applications, and developers have paid Rails back in accolades and adoption.Around the same time as Rails was emerging, Macromedia (later bought by Adobe) was bringing a product codenamed "Royale" to market as Flexa server-side Flash compiler. Flash had been experiencing a groundswell of developers wanting to build rich interfaces for web applications, not just animations or "Punch the Monkey" ads. Flash developers loved that they could build interfaces that would be extremely hard, if not impossible, to produce in HTML and JavaScript, but the Flash IDE was more suited to timeline animations. Flex changed all that by offering an easy-to-understand XML language for developing Flash interfaces, as well as a component set that made it dead simple to build applications. Flex 2 made things even better by taking the Flex compiler off the server so that there was no requirement of building and deploying Flash movies (SWFs) using the Flex framework and compiler. Flex 3 is one step better by being open source!The Flex language has come a long way too. Bruce Eckel, the author of such books as Thinking in C++, Second Edition (Prentice Hall, 2000) and Thinking in Java, Fourth Edition (Prentice Hall, 2006), said it best when he said, "Flex is a DSL for graphics, multimedia, and UIs" ( http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=193593 ). DSL, or Domain Specific Language, is a language with terms that match up well with a certain problem domain, and the term DSL should resonate with Rails developers. Flex, more than HTML with JavaScript, is a language for building rich interfaces quickly and easily.Flex and Rails developers haven't crossed paths that often, but more and more as the word gets out about each technology, developers want to know what these two are about. Having worked for years with both Flex and Rails, we believe that both have something powerful to offer developers who want to build desktop-like functionality into web apps quickly, in a team environment, with the ability to be agile and react to the ever-changing requirements of building and delivering an application to the web. Audience for This Book?Chances are you're reading this introduction to figure out if this book is for you. Have a look at these "stories" and see if any of them sound familiar. RickRails Guy