flexonrails.net

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….

After reading this post on the Midnight Coders forum about a method for eliminating the need for mapping services in the remoting-config.xml file WebORB for PHP, and driven by my intense dislike of configuration, I thought I would see if the same thing is possible in WebORB for Rails. Turns out it is really easy.

Here is all you have to do:

1. add endpoint="/weborb" to your RemoteObject definition.

2. Make sure that the destination property on the RemoteObject matches the name of the service class that you want to call in Rails.

For example, if you had a service class in your Rails app called IssueService, here is what the RemoteObject would look like in Flex:

    <mx:RemoteObject id="issueService" destination="IssueService"
    		    endpoint="/weborb"
		    showBusyCursor="true"
		    result="event.token.resultHandler( event );"
		    fault="event.token.faultHandler( event );">
    </mx:RemoteObject>

That’s all you have to do. Now you don’t have to add any mappings to the remoting-config.xml file (note that you still need to keep the file because WebORB looks for it, you just don’t have to do anything with it), and you can get rid of the -services argument in your compiler options.

I’ve set up all of the services in one of my apps like this and everything seems to be working properly. Let me know if you encounter any issues with this, or if you have any questions.

In Part 2 of the tutorials that I have been writing about the Issue Tracker sample app (view, source) I discussed how you can Get Typed Objects from Rails using [RemoteClass]. Now, with the latest version of WebORB, it is also possible send typed objects from Flex to Rails.

This means that you no longer have to use untyped objects or XML to send values from Flex to Rails. Now you can just pass typed value objects back and forth between Flex and Rails.

So now, in the Issue Tracker sample app, when an IssueVO is sent from Flex to Rails, because it is mapped to the Issue ActiveRecord class (using the process that is explained in Part 2), it automatically gets converted to an Issue ActiveRecord instance. If the value of the id attribute on the IssueVO matches an existing Issue ActiveRecord then WebORB will return that object, otherwise it will create a new ActiveRecord instance.

This makes it possible to simplify the updateIssue method as follows:

  def updateIssue(issue)
    issue.save
  end