Chapter 3. Getting started

 

Perhaps one day this too will be pleasant to remember.

Virgil

In this iteration, we’ll start making some real headway in our application. By the end of it, we’ll have a good starting point for any Flex + Rails application, and the pomodo application in particular. We’ll start by freezing Rails and then installing and running restful_authentication, and then creating and running the migration to create users. Next, we’ll switch to the Flex side and get user creation and login functional. Finally, we’ll ensure that the minimal test suite passes.

This iteration is a bit of a long, hard slog—hence the opening quote. Please rest assured that the book gets a lot more fun after this iteration is over.

Note

The folders in the code zip file show the code at the end of each iteration. You can start at any iteration from 3–12 in this book by beginning with the code in the folder from the previous iteration; if you aren’t interested in following along with the early stuff but want to follow along starting with iteration 9, you should read iterations 1–8 and then start iteration 9 with the code from the iteration08 folder. You would rename the project from iteration08 to pomodo and import it using the same procedure as is shown next.

3.1. If you’re starting here

3.2. Freezing the Rails version

3.3. Disabling browser navigation integration

3.4. Adding login functionality to Rails

3.5. Adding login functionality to Flex

3.6. Adding data to the test fixtures

3.7. Checking the tests

3.8. Configuring Flex Builder to run and debug pomodo

3.9. Summary