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.

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…

Never before have I hosted a rails application on a production environment. Never have I thought about this until now.

Having recently finished chapter four of FlexibleRails, Expanding the Flex UI from Flexible Rails, it dawned on me that people are always complaining about deploying rails applications.

I have had a Dreamhost account for the longest time. I opened it for another-now-defunct-project and seldom play with it anymore… I read their wiki, which is great, and it seems moving over the Pomodo application from the book will be simple as can be.

Following their instructions, we have Pomodo, my first flexible rails hosted application.

Ok, ok, so it does not do anything right now; I haven’t done anything else but read thru Dreamhost wiki and followed directions. I expect to update this hosted version of ever so often. Very cool indeed!

Nice observation; application runs faster on Dreamhost than on my local computer. A few things come to mind; application is running in production mode AND it is not using WEBrick. Awesome.

The book Flexible Rails, by Peter Armstrong, is a guide into building Rich Internet Applications using Flex as the front end to a Ruby on Rails Application. It started out as a PDF download at Lulu.com. Eventually, it became a Manning book.

Since its inception, the author wrote the book as, us, the readers, worked thru the exercises. One important aspect of these technologies worht pointing out is that Flex has gone thru one major revision and Rails has gone through at least one minor revision. For each of these updates to the technologies used in the book, Peter has completely reworked the book. Even more peculiar is that Peter explains the code in Mac, Linux AND Windows version… Remember these three platforms differ ever so slightly on syntax at the command prompt for rails. Most of everything else is the same across these three. He even went as far as to refactor the code into Cairngorm and RubyAMF. These were not even part of his original version of the book. Lastly, he keeps google groups for the readers which he actively participates in AND Manning has a forum for the book which Peter frequents as well. How cool is that?

I had worked throu most of book in PDF form with Flex 2 Builder back in September and found the merging of Flex and Rails very intriguing. Having spent most of my professional time writing database-driven Coldfusion applications, Rails is both easy to pick up and a bit more agile to boot! I’ve been trying to get my colleagues exited about both Flex and Rails separately for the longest time with little success.

This book is a great example of how to use both these technologies to create applications that beat the pants out of the usual html gui we see everyday. Likewise, if you can get your colleagues to read it, I think this book would be very valuable persuading them to give either Flex or rails a chance… Why do some people need so much convincing?!

Anyways, as soon as the paper print came out, I ordered from Manning and put in shelf for when I had time to do again, now with Flex 3 and Rails 2.x goodness. I even archived old codebase anxiously anticipating doing the paper version.

Well, with growing frustrations trying to wrap up chapter Four of Programming Collective Intelligence so I can put a search engine here, I decided the time was right to revisit Flexible Rails book. I just finished Part one of Flexible Rails last night and I am up and running with a Flex and Rials app I can both join and log into. Yipee!

The print version gives me the impression that the author is having a conversation with the reader while the reader works thru the code. This is most likely becuase I’ve been doing this book for longer than usual by now. Still, the commentary is great and should not be skipped; it contains the whys and the hows on the way the application is being developed. More than once, I’ve followed his code exactly and it does not work… Each time I’ve gone back and re-read his commentary to find an ‘I told you it wasn’t gonna work if you do that’.

As soon as Peter gets his next book writen; I’ll be sending my money!