This is the one of the most exciting topic in web development in my opinion. Why ? It’s because Adobe Flex gives us amazing flexible tool for creating RIA interfaces. I mean we can be very productive in creating very very usable and beautiful interfaces for our applications, and what is more it is can’t be even compared to Ajax capabilities. Ok, this is frontend but what about backend ? Here we have another cool and productive stuff in this category - Ruby on Rails. Of course you can now say “ohh now he said that NXD is easier way, that Seaside is great and the only way, and now he’s talking about Rails again” - yes, but everything depends on what problems we have to solve. If it’s unnecessary to implement extremely difficult business logic I prefer NXD (native xml databse) and Flex. But Rails destination is exactly to solve these difficult problems. On other hand sometimes also there is no need to use something so powerfull like Flex - in this case, my favorit is now Seaside and some Ajax stuff like YUI or Prototype and Script.aculo.us So generally how many solutions we know, so many problems we can solve properly.

Back to Flex and Rails, last time I found sth called Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 this is one of the series Dzone Refcardz. But to be honest it’s not outstanting help, there is about 8 pages of pdf lecture. Best start of using Flex and Rails is to read Peter Armstrong’s book Flexible Rails (Flex 3 on Rails 2). I’ve read this book and it’s really good, unfortunately based on Cairngorm framework (rubbish). If the author had mentioned about PureMVC there, it could be simple outstanding. There is a couple examples of different ways of communication between Flex and Rails. First he’s talking about REST in Rails so XML way. Later there is an example of AMF format but with RubyAMF (open source flash remoting gateway for rails) which is much faster than WebORB and easier to use. But there are other solutions e.g. Flex Dynamic Scaffolding for Ruby on Rails, here is also screencast and project site. Interesting is also Ruboss framework but I haven’t tried it yet. From their page ” The goal of the Ruboss Framework is to automate much of the plumbing necessary to use Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR with Ruby on Rails. The Ruboss Framework brings the design principles and productivity of Rails to Flex development, and makes integration with RESTful Rails controllers as simple as possible.” See also announcing enterprise flexible rails book.

Generally Flex and Rails gives a lot of fun and profit in web developing, so try it and have fun