Flexible Rails - Home

About

2007-10-22T19:00:00Z

book: $20 PDF, $49.99 PDF + print - both on sale at Manning now!

Flexible Rails is a book about how to use Adobe Flex 3 and Ruby on Rails 2 together to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

It is not an exhaustive Ruby on Rails tutorial (Agile Web Development with Rails does that already) or a Flex 3 reference manual (Adobe ships over 2000 pages of PDF reference documentation with Flex 3).

Instead, it is an extensive tutorial, developed iteratively, on building a fairly interesting RIA using Flex 3 and Rails 2 together.

The book is complete and is available from Manning in both PDF ($20) and combo (Print book + PDF, $49.99) formats. Please consider buying the PDF or the PDF + print book combo direct from Manning--having a PDF copy of the book is very helpful, since you can copy and paste the code direct from the book as you read, and you can also keep the book with you on your laptop and leave the print book at home.

Over a thousand readers have read Flexible Rails in "early access" form, both from the Manning Early Access Program and when I self-published it on Lulu. (Flexible Rails rose to #73 all-time on the Lulu sales rank before I "retired" it from Lulu and it became a Manning book.)

Reviews

Here is some of what people have already said about the book:

"I've had an early look at the book, and it's really well done. If you're doing any work on Flex and Ruby, I'd highly recommend getting a copy of it."
-- Mike Potter, Web / Open Source Evangelist, Developer Relations, Adobe

"For those of you who want a little more richness in your application interfaces, and AJAX just isn’t cutting it, Flexible Rails is exactly what you’ve been waiting for.

--Steven Baker, original creator of RSpec, the Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) framework for Ruby

"Flexible Rails is an excellent “beta book” on the use of Adobe Flex with Ruby on Rails, but I think the beta book handle is a bit of a misnomer, particularly for this book. The book itself is the “tip of the iceberg” for a collection of resources managed by the author, Peter Armstrong, around the subject. In addition to the pdf formatted book, with (typically monthly) updates, book purchase gets you access to the following:

A Google code group with several hundred of the book’s readers, closely monitored by the author.
A pretty nice application, “pomodo”, which is the subject grist for the book’s mill.
Complete Web 2.0 style bug tracking for the book and pomodo errata.

The book is divided into over 20 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 tutorial.

The Web 2.0 style participation in the evolution of the book and pomodo, provides huge value over and above the Flex and Rails tutorial itself. This participation is at least as enlightening, for those of us that would like to better understand and leverage the Web 2.0 participation-age tools and techniques, as it is in teaching the development of Rails and Flex applications. That is, if you don’t buy the book now, I think you miss out on a lot of valuable teaching that flows from the process.

To see more reviews, click here.

Code Samples

2006-11-19T07:03:00Z

These are the links for the complete MIT-licensed code from the Manning and Lulu versions of the book:

This is the link for the zip file which contains the code (using Flex 3 Beta 3 and Rails 2 Release Candidate 1) for ALL the completed iterations in the Manning version of the book (Flex 3 + Rails 2).

This is the link for the zip file which contains the code for ALL the completed iterations in the Lulu version of the book (Flex 2 + Rails 1.2).

Note: While I followed along during the typesetting process, ensuring that the code works with Rails 2 final (gem version 2.0.1), I'm not going to provide a new zip file for this. Why not? The very simple reason is that I actually followed along copying and pasting all the code from the PDF, but I don't want to take the enormous amount of time to format all the code I'm copying and pasting from the book to ensure that the formatting is identical to the book. (Copying from Acrobat strips the indentation, so it's too much work to do for almost no benefit to anyone.) Rest assured that this code has been tested with Rails 2.0.1, and that you can follow along with the book just fine--I just did it myself.

Flexible Rails Book Reviews and Buzz

2006-11-17T09:25:00Z

"Hi Peter,
Cannot say enough good things about your book – it’s exactly what I was looking for – highly informative, and an incredibly enjoyable read to boot. THANK YOU!!
Having read through the book once I am now doing what I rarely do with any technical book that I buy (and that’s a LOT of books) – I am actually going back and working through the sample application..."
Steve Ovens
Principal Consultant
Vanguard Integration Pty. Ltd.
Melbourne

"Peter, thanks for a very useful honest and well written book. Exactly what I was looking for to combine Rails and Flex. ... It is very useful to see the organization of your code. ... GREAT JOB! THANKS!"
...this was followed by the following (I love that readers are using the code as the basis for their own projects):
"My Agile Issue tracker project based on your book might get useful in a month or so. If you are interested to include it as an example of a working code derived from your book I'll be more than happy. The project home is at http://code.google.com/p/tuskit/"
Dmitry Mozzherin Ph.D.
Senior Programmer Analyst
Medical Informatics Department
Stony Brook University

"Hi Peter,

I bought your book about a month or so ago. It has been a great help as has been the forum. My small firm has now become truly proficient at Rails and Flex2 RIAs. It has led to some good work. Most of all, though, we have been focusing a lot of our development on open source apps for non-profits. The efficiency of the Rails/Flex2 development pattern along with a well managed Agile approach have made for an incredibly productive team. Moreover, we are able to deliver some fabulous functionality to some amazing non-profit organizations that otherwise would not have had access to similar desktop proprietary software. All of this is to say thank you for your work. We and our non-profit clients have benefited immensely.

Peace"
     -- Roberto A. Santiago, President, raSANTIAGO & Associates LLC

"As far as Flex on Rails, Peter Armstrong has got a really good book called Flexible Rails... That's a really good resource."
     -- Tony Hillerson from effectiveUI, at the end of a podcast interview on The Flex Show.

"I've had an early look at the book, and its really well done. If you're doing any work on Flex and Ruby, I'd highly recommend getting a copy of it."
     -- Mike Potter, Web / Open Source Evangelist, Developer Relations, Adobe

"For those of you who want a little more richness in your application interfaces, and AJAX just isn’t cutting it, Flexible Rails is exactly what you’ve been waiting for.

Peter presents the material clearly, and does a great job of bringing the reader from zero to useful application skills quickly. This is a great introduction to a very interesting application of Rails."
--Steven Baker, creator of RSpec, the Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) framework for Ruby

"Flexible Rails is an excellent “beta book” on the use of Adobe Flex with Ruby on Rails, but I think the beta book handle is a bit of a misnomer, particularly for this book. The book itself is the “tip of the iceberg” for a collection of resources managed by the author, Peter Armstrong, around the subject. In addition to the pdf formatted book, with (typically monthly) updates, book purchase gets you access to the following:

A Google code group with several hundred of the book’s readers, closely monitored by the author.
A pretty nice application, “pomodo”, which is the subject grist for the book’s mill.
Complete Web 2.0 style bug tracking for the book and pomodo errata.

I think the beta book designation is unfortunate and misleading. It needs a better name. The “book” presents a multi-dimensional, first-class, hands-on learning experience that is tough to quantify, but really easy to qualify: don’t miss it. "
     --Lou Springer, Enterprise Architect at Sun Microsystems

"Looks like it could become the guide for those interested in the interoperability of Rails and Flex."
     -- Peter Cooper, Ruby Inside

"This book is about using Macromedia’s Flex 2.0 and Ruby on Rails 1.1 together. The book presents the technologies as a tutorial. It gives a brief introduction and covers entire Web 2.0 application development: front end (Flex), web tiers (Rail), database and installation. It goes beyond typical tutorial books that you actually got a working and usable application at the end."
     --Thomas Yip, The Big Grid

"Not only the book covers two of the most sought after new web technologies (its Web 2.0 coolness mark is absolutely incredible) but it is a treat to read and follow. Peter's approach is to guide us creating an application that is actually useful and complete, while educating the reader on all the foundations that make up a great Rich Internet Application both from the development/maintenance and end user perspectives.

This is light hearted book that while very professional is also filled with Web 2.0 humour (note: understanding of Web 2.0 isn't a requirement for reading the book!). This just makes the experience of reading a 300+ pages (in its current alpha form) that much more enjoyable."
-- Olivier Modica

"I wholeheartedly recommend checking this book out and buying it if you are at all interested in developing Web 2.0 applications."
-- Rich Breton, Digital Realism Personified

Frequently Asked Questions

2006-11-17T09:10:00Z

(Updated 2007-10-24.)

Q. How do I buy the book?

A. Please buy it direct from Manning at this link.

Q. How do Flex and Rails fit together?

A. This diagram (a screenshot of part of one of the pages of the book) shows it best.

Q. What is Flex, and why should I care if I'm a Ruby on Rails developer?

A. Briefly, Flex is a way of building applications that run inside the Flash player. You write code in ActionScript (similar to JavaScript) and layout a GUI using MXML (an XML dialect). This is all compiled into a SWF file that runs inside the Flash player.

So what does this have to do with Rails? Simple: in all the discussion so far, I have not mentioned a server-side technology stack. That's where Rails fits in. (Well, 2/3 of Rails: Action View obviously isn't as central to the Flex + Rails equation as Active Record and Action Controller are.)

Flex is intended to be easy to learn for developers with absolutely no Flash experience but who have experience developing web or desktop applications. This was true for me when I learned Flex 1.0: I had never used Flash, but very quickly I had written the better part of a chess game (fairly slick Flex client, a server written in Java, etc). (My background is years of working full-time with Java Swing, with a few months of PHP over six years ago.)

Earlier versions of Flex targeted Flash 7 and Flash 8; the book is about Flex 3, which targets Flash 9.

You should care about Flex if you are a Ruby on Rails developer and want to rapidly develop applications that can take advantage of the many features of Flash 9 (but developing at a higher level than Flash) and still getting the benefit of using Rails as your server-side component.

Q. What about OpenLaszlo? How does Flex compare?

A. I haven't done much with OpenLaszlo beyond "hello world" a long time ago, so I can't say anything meaningful about the comparison. (But buy my book anyway to see what you're missing ;-)

Flex 3 vs. OpenLaszlo vs. AJAX is an interesting question. For me, it comes down to choosing the best tool for your requirements. If you need to target Flash 7, for example, OpenLaszlo obviously wins over Flex 3. Luckily, Rails is such a great framework that it can work with all three...

Q. Who are you? What is your background with Flex and Rails?

A. I have been working with Flex full-time since July 2004 (since before Flex 1.0), and tracking Ruby on Rails since mid-2005 (since before Rails 1.0). Before switching to Flex, I spent five years working with Java Swing, with a brief stint with PHP during the dotcom bubble in 2000. As someone with a heavy Swing background, I initially found Flex appealing since it felt very familiar--more like Swing development than web development.

Q. How should I know whether the book is worth buying?

A. Hundreds of people bought the Lulu book and liked it, so it's a pretty good bet you will too. You can go to Manning's website and see the table of contents and other information.

Q. What prompted you to write this book?

A. The desire for fame and fortune, obviously. (Don't believe anyone who writes anything of any meaningful length and tells you otherwise :-) Also, in January of 2006 (when I had the idea for the book), no one in the world cared (that I could tell) about the combination of Flex and Rails but me. When you have an idea that you think is ahead of its time, you want to share it...

In case anyone cares, here's the detailed timeline:

On January 31, 2006, after over a year and a half of working with Flex and over six months of playing with Rails (building toy apps, reading Agile Web Development with Rails, etc) I finally realized that for many applications Rails was the perfect server-side technology to complement Flex--and on the flip-side, that Flex offered capabilities that were either difficult, impossible, buggy or merely annoying to do on with JavaScript / AJAX / DHTML on the client side. (Especially if, like me, you're not a JavaScript guru like Thomas Fuchs.) Furthermore, while RJS templates are very promising, at the end of the day you are still dealing with the joy of HTML, JavaScript, CSS and browser compatibility issues.

So, I did what I always do whenever I have a Really Great Idea: I registered a domain name. I wanted a name which would be good name for promoting a possible book about using Flex and Rails together, so the natural choice was flexiblerails.com. I also got flexiblerails.net and .org since I was so sure of how good an idea this was. [By January 2006 the massive success of Agile Web Development with Rails had put dollar signs in the heads not only of publishers but also of many in the Rails community who had blogs. (After all, writing a book can't be much harder than writing a few blog posts, right? Right?)]

I then did what I also typically do whenever I have a Really Great Idea:

Nothing.

Between the demands of my job and my two-year-old son, I was too busy, too tired, etc. Besides, I had a lot of Really Great Ideas (and domain names to go with them!), and I wasn't acting on any of them--what made this one worth doing? So, time passed.

Then, it was announced that the Flex 2 SDK would be free (as in beer) and I thought again: yep, Flex and Rails will be perfect together, especially since Flex 2 will be so much better than Flex 1.5.

Again: nothing. I'm too busy; I'm too tired; I'd rather play Civ 4; the list goes on.

Then, Flex 2 went through its Beta cycles and was released, with Flex Builder costing only $499 (the expectation had been that it would cost $999, since Adobe had announced it would be less than $1000).

Again: nothing.

Then in July 2006 I stumbled upon an absolutely excellent tutorial written by Stuart Eccles on liverail.net (written on April 16, 2006) about using Flex and Rails together, and then upon another one (written on the same day!) on Christophe Coenraets' blog, and realized that I wasn't alone in thinking this was a Really Great Idea--and that if I was ever going to write anything about it, I'd better get off my butt and do it now. The most ironic thing was that the liverail.net tutorial rails application was called (you guessed it) flexiblerails. For me, this was truly the "get off your butt and do something you moron" moment: The first really good tutorial about Flex and Rails together had used the same name for its example application that I had registered as a domain name months earlier! (If anyone cares: I registered flexiblerails.com on January 31, 2006. Stuart Eccles published Part 1 of his excellent tutorial on April 16, 2006, and I had missed seeing it until July 2006! If I didn't love my domain name so much I would have named this book something else, so as not to cause confusion between this book and the tutorial on his blog. I hope that this chronology is a sufficient acknowledgement of--and even an homage to--his tutorial: This book would not exist if his tutorial hadn't motivated me to finally do what I had already thought of doing.)

After this, I released the book on Lulu and spent over a year writing and revising it. I am now updating it to Flex 3 and Rails 2 and releasing it as a Manning book.

I hope that this book is useful to you.

Q. Isn't lots of the above material stolen from the Preface and Introduction?

A. Wow, someone actually read the Preface!

Q. Did you actually register the domain name 38noises.com?

A. Yeah, I did--I thought it was really funny. (My wife will testify to the fact that I buy too many domain names for stupid reasons!)