Mario Talavera Writes

Finding myself with all this free time and aside from working on the house and playing with the kids; I have been working my way thru this recently released book.

Similarly to Flexible Rails, Flex on Rails illustrates how to create and integrate applications where the client tier is written in Flex and the back end is written in Rails. While Flexible Rails provides you with a roadmap to creating a full blown application, Flex on Rails is a bit looser on the guidance it provides. Instead doing a lot of hand holding thru every step of the application(s) it encompasses to create, it dives right into many of the most desirable integration problems a developer would encounter or wants to tackle. In this fashion, it reads a little bit like a cookbook.

Most of the integration exercises are well known and recurring in any developer’s career like CRUD thru RESTful services, xml data manipulation, debugging multi tier applications, test driven development, working with hierarchical data and nested sets.

I still haven’t done the most exciting chapters (I am still on Chapter 5, Passing Data with AMF), but I find the material and approach novel and interesting.

Ironically, I find some of the topics covered in this book to be second nature because of my last job.  Life is funny life that. For example, the chapters on debugging, test driven development and authentication would have been a lot more enlightening in a Flex context if I hadn’t spent last year soaking in these from my colleagues.

If you decide to check book out at your local bookstore, do yourself a favor and print a coupon for decent savings. I was able to save 40% last week.

Lastly, if you buy it with the intention of working thru the whole book; I recommend matching the version of Rails the book uses as the authors use some interesting features that are buggy in the latest release of Rails. So far, this bug in Rails 2.3.2 will prevent you from fully implementing some of the features the authors use. Downgrading my Rails version to match book’s allowed me to proceed without slowing me down much.

I am happy more resources are coming out on this topic (Flex and Rails) for I think it is one of the most fun, affordable and exciting combinations available to us. I commend the author’s as well from answering my emails promptly when (easily) stumped. If you find this technology combination interesting and feel comfortable working in either Flex or Rails, I highly recommend this book.

Moving from a software development position where most of the application code is in Coldfusion to a position doing Flex development has brought a few difficulties in my professional life. One of the most impacting ones is that reference resources are not the same.

Sure, there is some overlap. Both Coldfusion and Flex are Adobe products, there’s quite a few reference books and articles online that deal with both products. Even some of the most vocal Coldfusion bloggers use Flex and vice-versa. These have not proven as useful as I always thought they were.

Besides derailing a colleague’s thought process, one of the best resources I have used so far is Adobe’s online documentation for Flex, most specifically, Programing ActionScript 3.0. FYI – all these documents are available bundled in a zip file with all available pdfs from Adobe and its totally worth the download.

The other most helpful resource is the book titled Object Oriented ActionScript 3.0 by Friends of Ed (Apress). This books starts from the very basics and covers a wide array of topics. I particularly like that, while most of the content is new to me, some of the topics are familiar. I feel this book has a good mix of topics I really need to grasp and topics that merit review but that I don’t have to focus so much on.

I am only half way thru book now and I’m learning a lot form it. Mostly, it is making me feel comfortable in this ‘new’ environment I find myself in.

The only thing I find distracting, and this is applicable to me because I am not familiar with ActionScript 1.0 or 2.0 (barely with 3.0 so to say…), is the conscious contrast the authors present of the the differences between the old and new way of writing ActionScript. I acknowledge this is essential for those familiar with the evolution of the language but I am happily ignorant of such differences and intend to staythis way.

Odd that one of the most useful things to a seasoned ActionScript developer is of so little use for me… I can see myself going back to these parts of the book and finding some bits of wisdom I wish I had paid attention to in the first place. Rock on.

I feel the authors have done a great job of simplifying my life and I want to thank them for this. The book’s main web-page did not come up when I searched Friends of Ed but does come up from the Apress page (parent publishing company of Ed’s). I wish I had found this book a few weeks ago instead of scouring the web for helpful advice in all the wrong places

Lastly – for all who believe all you need to learn you can learn from the internet (Google me an education) and that books are overrated I still disagree with you.

I have had some time to fiddle with DreamHost to properly host Peter Armstrong’s Pomodo sample application. I have changed how it was being hosted so that I do not have to make any changes to the code prior to uploading it from my computer and I’ve decided to use a sub-domain instead of a directory inside of domain.

I’ve revised the link on previous post as well. I think http://pomodo.bitterbug.com sounds a lot better.

Ok, ok, application still does not do much. You can, at least, register (I am not keeping any info; feel free to make it up) and login afterwards. It just felt like the right time to host this exercise because chapter four (creating the UI) was so much fun.

Lastly, yes, I am keeping the cheese-ness for now; if its good enough for the book; its good enough for me.

On to chapter five where things get even more interesting…