Preface

All books have a low point during writing, and this book had a lower one than most. Specifically, this book was born out of three almost simultaneous failures at the end of 2008:

The failure of the Ruboss Framework as a commercial product
The failure of Enterprise Flexible Rails as a book
The failure of the format of Hello! Flex 3

In the immortal words of hip-hop superstar Friedrich Nietzsche,^[1] “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” and this perfect storm of failure that ended 2008 for me definitely made me stronger—and made Hello! Flex 4 a much better book.

¹ What, you thought I was quoting German philosopher Kanye West?

That is the short version; if you want the long one, read on...

Shortly after Flexible Rails was published by Manning in early 2008, I began working full-time on my company Ruboss and recruited a co-founder, Dima Berastau. We were bootstrapping a product called the Ruboss Framework by doing consulting. The Ruboss Framework was licensed under GPL v3 and a commercial license, so it was free for Flex and $499 for the AIR version. I wanted to market the Ruboss Framework by writing a book about it, so I discussed with Mike Stephens at Manning a sequel to Flexible Rails, titled Enterprise Flexible Rails, which would pick up where Flexible Rails left off and lead readers to using the Ruboss Framework for their Flex projects.