cookies and code

So I spoke to Simeon Bateman this weekend at cf.objective() and he was showing me something really cool, Flex talking to a Rails app. He was using a technology called Web Orb which installs as a plugin to your Rails app. In the demo Simeon showed me he started up the Rails app using WebBrick and then his Flex app worked w/o a hitch. From what I could tell, using the plugin was as simple as creating an XML file used to map controller actions in Rails to aliases which can be referenced using the RemoteObject tag in MXML or the RemoteClass metadata needed to use the AMF gateway to transfer VO across the wire.

What comes to mind which makes this really cool is the idea of rapidly producing a service layer API using Rails. Imagine what type of productivity could be gained from doing this in the Flex community.

We also had a good chat about JRuby and how it could definitely be used to create the Rails app feeding data to Flex. What’s even crazier is, would you even need WebOrb if you could write a ServiceLocator that uses the javax.script package in Java 6 to invoke JRuby services? Who’s to say that you couldn’t write an adapter and include it as a JAR dependency for JRuby for Flex integration?

Just some ideas. Any thoughts?