Customer Reviews

Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2

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2 star:		(2)
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I started reading this book back in its beta form, continuing with it until its current release. Flexible Rails evolved into a great book.

I came across Flexible Rails when I was evaluating using Flex for my company's flagship application GUI. Rails was already the back-end of choice, but I wasn't quite sure about the complexity of integrating that with a Flex client. This book helped show me that Flex and Rails could be developed together effectively.

Some of the highlights of Flexible Rails for me are:

- The book provides a non-trivial example application to build upon throughout the book.
- The book highlights real software development life-cycle steps to pull together the examples.
- The book puts all of the examples in context.
- The book covers REST.
- The book covers using RubyAMF.
- The book covers using the Cairngorm micro-architecture.
- The book covers the basics of turning the example application into an Adobe AIR application.
- The book has useful explanations of using FlexBuilder, Subversion, and other software development tools.

Overall, the book has an entertaining and very readable style. Flexible Rails created a standard to which I hold other technical books. You definitely get your money's worth.

Whenever a new technology that interests me hits the streets, I buy everything that gets published (well, almost everything). I have six or eight books on ActionScript 3 and Flex 2 and 3, most of which are very good. I also have an embarrassingly large collection of Ruby and Rails books. I haven't written a review for any of them, simply because they are just 'good' books. But this book is phenomenal! It knits together best practices of Flex development seamlessly with best practices in Rails, demonstrates a solid client-side architecture and ties it to a RESTful Rails architecture. It shows how to do validation and error handling on both the server and client sides. It contrasts different Flex event-driven architectures and shows how to map each to the server side api. It fills in all of the gaps that I puzzled over when trying to integrate Flex and Rails in a single development and runtime environment over the past year.

There is a lot of code in the book ... it is basically an extensive tutorial. The application developed in the book has the feel of a real and sufficiently complex project. What is truly amazing is that ALL OF THE CODE WORKS! In fact, I have found only one typo in the entire book. Caveat: I am only two-thirds of the way through, but I have seen enough to be blown away. This is what good written training ought to be. Well done, Peter Armstrong and Manning!

The combination of Rails on the server and Flex on the client is a beautiful thing. It is incredibly fun and satisfying to work with. Although you will probably have the most fun if you have already done some RESTful Rails and some Flex programming, the experience is not strictly a prerequisite. Get it and go!

The opening iterations (chapters) develop a standard Flex client-side application architecture. It is the architecture that I found in my other Flex books. Latter parts of the book show a refactoring of the 'standard' architecture to a Cairngorm-style MVC architecture. This results in a much more manageable and extensible application architecture. Then it shows a refactoring to use ActionScript objects appropriately in lieu of XML on the client. Next, it shows how to the RubyAMF Flash Remoting gateway for communications between Flex and Rails. Finally, it refactors the client code to run in AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), a cross-platform standalone client-side environment.

If you are a beginner to Flex get 'Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source' by Tapper et al (pre-orderable in Flex 3 version)

If you want to see deep into Flex and its capabilities, especially when tied to a Java server, get
'Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java (Secrets of the Masters)' by Yakov et al

But if you are into Rails and want the best tutorial on Flex and Rails, this is it!

Flexible Rails is an excellent book on the use of Adobe Flex with Ruby on Rails, but I think merely calling this a book falls short of what its about. The book itself is the "tip of the iceberg" for a collection of resources etablished by the author, Peter Armstrong, around the subject.

In addition to the book itself, for complete immersion you should access the following:

* The on-line group and list service with several hundred of the book's readers, closely monitored by he author.

* A pretty nice application, "pomodo", which is the subject grist for the book's mill.

* Complete Web 2.0 style bug tracking for pomodo errata.

The book is divided into over a dozen iterations, wherein pomodo is variously built, refactored, debugged, sliced, diced and otherwise explored from every conceivable angle with respect to Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex. The process of the book's elaboration parallels the complete elaboration of pomodo itself, and sharpens the edge of the turorial.

This is a great book to learn Flex, because you get to see a complete application. I used it to connect Flex with Grails instead of Rails. It helps to know a little Flex before you use this book, but it was one of the first books I used to learn Flex, and I am still using it. For example, I used it to see how to handle XML data and error messages sent back from the server. I also used it to learn Cairngorm. I also learned how to send requests via ActionScript instead of MXML. Not part of the book: I am now learning how to connect Flex to Blazeds and Java JPA/Hibernate objects. If this works well, I can use it instead of Grails or Rails on the server side.

I have used Flex for about a year and I have only dabbled in Ruby/Rails development. I have been curious how I might back a Flex front end with a simple service layer that isn't hard to create, maintain or host. So far I have only worked with Java/Spring/Hibernate backend services which can take a little while to build and integrate (Grails is MUCH faster).

After about 100 pages I'm in interation 4 building an interesting RIA with a Rails backend that I can host on relatively inexpensive server if I wanted to. My only struggles thus far was getting MySQL going properly. But that was only because I forgot a step in installing it.

If you have little exposure to Rails and/or Flex and you feel at home on the command line as well as you do in an IDE like Eclipse, this is a great "project" book for you. I'd say you probably want a primer in Ruby, Rails and Flex before you get going but it is pretty easy follow and has a lot of free professional advice from someone that has obviously been around the block a few times. Peter is very upfront about some things that he has done in the book that should not be considered "best practice".

I am hoping to get some good insight how I might do something similar for Flex and Grails. Regardless, I am confident this is going to be a fun journey!

I wasn't sure whether a mixed-technologies book would be adequate for both reading and reference, especially with two technologies. As both a software engineer and a moonlighting instructor this book was an easy read from the start. Mr. Armstrong explores both Flex 3 and Rails 2 with enough background information on both technologies to get a reader ready to code--and that was just Chapter...err...Iteration 1. The second iteration begins with coding (Hello World) and it doesn't stop. This is a must for your coding library and makes a great textbook for students who enrolled in courses geared toward building web and Rich Internet Applications.

The author goes into great detail on how to efficiently get Rails and Flex working together. The book is updated for the latest version of Rails as well as the upcoming Flex 3 release. I've found the book easy to follow along with and enjoy the author's humor spread throughout the book.

As a developer I'm often tasked with making "things talk to each other". Typically if I can I'll use a tool like Flex Builder for a project and if I have a choice I'll pick Java, .NET or Ruby for the server back end - whatever is the best fit. This book only backed up my belief that Rails and Flex really do work very well together. I've learned a lot going through the code both on Rails and Flex.

I also liked how the author is continually refactoring the application (called "Pomodo"), that is where your learning kicks into overdrive. He uses the Cairngorm framework and even RubyAMF. I didn't have any experience in either up until this point. Now I can say I do and it all fits together nicely.

This book is a terrific introduction to the subject of Flex + Rails. It's also extremely current touching on Rails 2.0+ and Flex 3. The depth of this study is exceptional and really gives you the experience of developing a significant application, not just trivial examples. Also, the community is lively and the author is knowledgeable and responsive.

The only downside is that it gets fairly tough to get through now and again, but for the life of me I don't know how I would do better (and me and my staff have put thought into it). Peter has treated a complex subject in the best manner I can imagine.

This book is the authoritative source on the subject at the moment and well worth the investment.

The humour in this book is annoying to the point of distraction.

There appear to be lots of hacks and work-arounds for Rails, leaving me with the feeling that I would not touch Rails with a barge pole. An updated edition with Flex 4 and less humour would be warranted.

I love Flex, I have to admit!

The potential of front-end, client side UI, needs the ease of Rails to feed it. And this book gives you the idea of how to architect your applications.

Well written, and curiously encouraging to follow through.
I recommend it to anybody looking to build RIA (or whatever web2.0 label) exciting applications with the power of Flex.