flexonrails.net

The as3 Inflector class can be used to pluralize or singularize most words.  It is essentially a direct port of the Rails inflector class.

Here is a little demo Flex app that I put together to demo the classes functionality.

You can right click on the app to view the source and grab the class, or you can just click here.

Aaron Smith just released version 1.0 of RubyAMF – An open-source (MIT) remoting application for Ruby and Rails. This version is stable and it has really nice remoting implementation for Rails that makes it possible to use AMF right inside your controllers (i.e., no need for service classes). You can read all about it here. Aaron has also posted a great screencast tutorial on getting started with RubyAMF on Rails.

Keep up the good work Aaron!

Alex MacCaw has posted a really nice example of how his Juggernaut plugin for server-side push can be used with Adobe’s AIR (formerly Apollo) runtime to create a simple chat application.

redMine is a very nice, open-source (GPL), project management application that is being built with Ruby on Rails. If you are thinking about using Trac for project managment, then I definitely recommend that you take a look at redMine. I found that redMine was quite a bit easier to install than Trac, and I also found that it was easier to manage multiple projects with redMine. Also, I just generally like redMine’s interface.

You can check out a demo of redMine here.

Hobo is a framework that sits on top of Rails that makes application development with Rails even faster. Here is the description of Hobo from the website:

What is Hobo?

Hobo is an Open Source extension to Ruby on Rails which helps you build full blown web applications incredibly quickly and easily. Available as a Gem or Rails plugin, Hobo provides a simple, clean and elegant development framework which allows for rapid prototyping or production of the most sophisticated web applications.

Main Features:

* Rapid implementation of dynamic Ajax interfaces in your application with no extra programming.
* Switchable themes. Customise and tweak your application structure and layout to meet any design goals.
* Powerful mark-up language, DRYML, combines rapid development with ultimate design flexibility. The end of the cookie cutter blues!

There are some pretty impressive videos of Hobo in action up on the Hobo website. You can view them here.

RubyAMF is an open source Ruby application being developed by Aaron Smith that enables AMF0/3 communication between Flex/Flash and Ruby.

So, you might be asking yourself, how is this different from WebORB for Rails? Well, the main difference is in how the apps are architected. WebORB for Rails is built as Rails plugin. This makes it really easy to use WebORB for Rails with your Ruby on Rails applications. However, this means you need to use Rails if you want to use WebORB for Rails, even if you want to use it for an application that does require any Rails specific code.

RubyAMF, on the other hand, is designed to be integrated directly with a server and, as such, does not require Rails. It even comes with its own webrick servlet, which means that all you have to do to start RubyAMF is download it, point a command line to the root folder, and enter ruby server/start. This makes it dead simple to use RubyAMF to integrate Flex/Flash with a Ruby application. However, if you want to use RubyAMF with Rails then you are going to have to do a little extra work.

So, for right now my simple heuristic is that if you want to use AMF remoting with Rails, then use WebORB for Rails. If you want AMF remoting with just Ruby, then use RubyAMF. (I suppose the names make that kind of obvious).

That said, I think it would be relatively trivial to rearchitect either app to be like the other, but I think it is good that they are different. Choice is, generally, a good thing.

Right now the thing that has me most excited about RubyAMF is how it could potentially be used to extend Apollo using Ruby in much the same way that Artemis does using Java. More on this in my next post….

Rails 1.21 was released on Friday of last week. This release has many new features and fixes, including enhanced REST support and enhanced Unicode support. You can read all about it here. Or, if you want to dive right into the details, you check out the CHANGELOGS from the Rails API.

Ok, this time it should actually work.

http://apps.flexonrails.net/examples/

You can read more about this app in my previous post.

You can get the source for this app, and learn a little about what is going inside, by going to this post: http://flexonrails.net/?p=31
 

Most, if not all, all of the tutorials that I have seen about integrating Flex with Rails have used the WEBrick server that is included with Ruby.  While there is nothing wrong with using WEBrick for developing small apps on your local machine, I would recommend that most developers use Mongrel, especially if you are developing in a windows environment.

Mongrel (http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/) is going to get you much better performance than the CGI based WEBrick and it is just as easy to use.

To get Mongrel, make sure you have the latest versions of Ruby, Rails, RubyGems installed, then just run gem install mongrel from the command line and then follow the instructions on the screen.

To run Mongrel just go to the rails application that you want to run on the command line and run mongrel_rails start.

That’s it.  Just as easy as WEBBrick, and now your running in an environment that could be deployed for small scale apps.

Also, in honor of Zed Shaw’s (the creator of Mongrel) site here is a picture of my mongrel (Eva)