Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 [ペーパーバック]

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.