Flex and Rails Integration on Many Fronts

Posted by Luciano Ramalho on Jan 18, 2007

Sections

Development

Topics

Ruby ,

Rich Internet Apps ,

Ruby on Rails

Tags

Adobe ,

Web 2.0 ,

Flex ,

Rails Plugins

There's been a recent surge of announcements from projects mixing Ruby on Rails with Adobe Flex. The latest news is the release of the Flex scaffold generator from e-Genial, a pioneering Rails company in Brazil. The product is open source, and is hosted at RubyForge as flexscaffold. Carlos Eduardo, the author, has published a screencast to demo it.

The presentation has a few captions in Portuguese, but it can be easily followed by anyone who can click on the button labeled "continuar" (continue). To summarize, a very simple contact manager is built with RadRails, and the Flex scaffolding is generated and compiled to SWF by a rake task that is bundled with the flexscaffold generator. If you are in a hurry, skip to the last 10% of the screencast to see the finished Flex form and contact list working.

Mike Potter from Adobe has blogged about that and other developments as well. Cairgorm, Adobe's framework for Flex-powered RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), also has an open source Rails generator, developed by Ilya Devers. A new release of this package was made last week, and can be found in Google Code.

Besides code, new tutorials explaining Rails and Flex integration have been published. Flexible Rails, a PDF-only book, can be bought online, and the Flexonrails blog has been alive with posts about how to connect Rails to Flex through WebORB, a plugin that provides Flex RPC and Flash remoting functionality to Rails apps.

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