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….