Preface

On January 31, 2006, after over a year and a half of working with Flex and more than six months of playing with Rails (building toy apps, reading Agile Web Development with Rails, and so on), I finally realized that for many applications Rails was the perfect server-side technology to complement Flex—and on the flip side, that Flex offered capabilities that were either difficult, impossible, buggy, or merely annoying to do with JavaScript/AJAX/DHTML on the client side (especially if, like me, you’re not a JavaScript guru like Thomas Fuchs). Despite the productivity of Rails, at the end of the day we’re still dealing with the joys of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and browser compatibility issues.

So, I did what I always do whenever I have a Really Great Idea: I registered a domain name. I wanted a name that would be good for promoting a possible book about using Flex and Rails together, so the natural choice was flexiblerails.com. I also got flexiblerails.net and .org because I was so sure how good an idea this was. By January 2006, the massive success of Agile Web Development with Rails had put dollar signs in the heads not only of publishers but also of many in the Rails community who had blogs. After all, writing a book couldn’t be much harder than writing a few blog posts, right?

I then did what I typically do whenever I have a Really Great Idea: nothing.