Foreword

It was early in 2006 when I was discussing my fanaticism for the emerging framework Ruby On Rails down at the pub with friends. I mentioned to Mike Jones, a career Flash developer, that I thought Ruby On Rails would be great for integrating with his new favorite plaything, the Adobe Flex 2 beta. Here were two technologies born of the desire to make cool things easier to build. It was a match made in heaven, and I knew someone would do it soon.

In April and May of that year, I wrote a two-part tutorial on my blog liverail.net and also delivered a presentation at the London Flash Platform User Group, developing a RIA CRUD interface in Flex with a Ruby On Rails backend.

This was only the start of a wave of people marrying the two technologies that were gaining traction in the development community, from Flash/Flex developers with their first forays into backend development to seasoned Ruby programmers who would never have dreamed of developing anything on Flash, scared off by “The Timeline.” Since my initial blog posts, several people have taken to Flex and Rails with a lot of passion, developing integration software, launching startups, and posting blogs—none more so than Peter, who was dedicated/passionate/foolish enough to believe there was a whole book on the subject waiting to be written.