deepthoughts.orsomethinglikethat

I've been slowly considering the use of RubyAMF in a couple of new Rails projects. By "slowly" I mean that there have been some more pressing projects that have prevented me from really "diving in" and experimenting with RubyAMF; only leaving enough time to read some docs and follow the Google Group.

Consider my previously stated credentials when I say that RubyAMF looks great. Given the following recent events it appears that the project has a lot of momentum:

• Restful Rails integration by use of the respond_to block
• Mixbook's adoption (especially the Aaron & Aryk collaboration that led to huge performance gains)
• Peter Armstrong, the author of Flexible Rails has adopted, contributed to, and promoted RubyAMF over WebOrb
• Creation of new Rails generators
• and more I'm not aware of...

The latest RubyAMF blog posting, RubyAMF State of the Union (doubly posted on the Google Group) is basically a well-structured "rally the troops" announcement to the community. The project founder, Aaron, is moving on to some new projects leaving it to the community to keep up the momentum. I'm happy for him. I can't imagine how time consuming the almost-sole development of RubyAMF has been. This is the real test. How will the project fair on the shoulders of the community?

(Remember: I'm not in the know on the project, I'm seeking your thoughts and opinions, and for good times I'll pull out the good ole' "Jump To Conclusions Mat.")

It's too early to tell for sure, but from my point of view I'm a little disappointed (imagine me hypocritically pointing) with the lack of any community responses to either the blog post or the Google Group post. I say, "my point of view" because I'm hoping that there have been responses and things working that I'm unaware of.

One week ago RubyAMF had good momentum with a promising future. Is that still true today? Is it a bad time to start using RubyAMF?

FlexFM is an open source project created by the folks at Soliant Consulting as an alternative to Flex4Filemaker. This is great news! It's not that I wish Flex4Filemaker to die, but it wasn't setup for success from the start. Flex4Filemaker was created by my lonesome self as a favor with zero (afaik) production usage. I had hoped that someone/s would join in the project, but that never happened.

I am officially discontinuing development of Flex4Filemaker. I will not remove the project from google code, as I think at the very least it could be used for reference.
FlexFM is setup for success with big plans for continued development. I would highly recommend anyone interested in Flex4Filemaker to take a good look at FlexFM.

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There's a new API in town... one that you probably don't know or care about, but...

Well... that's all I've got. Lets try again...

Flex4FileMaker is a new Google Code project that currently allows an Adobe Flex 2 client to access a FileMaker database via the FileMaker Web Publishing Engine. By modeling Flex4FileMaker after the FileMaker API for PHP and leveraging Adobe Flex 2, the library accomplishes it's primary goal of enabling FileMaker developers to inexpensively build new, distributed, "cutting edge" user interfaces to new and existing FileMaker databases.

Some things to consider:

• The project is young.
• Flex4FileMaker currently only provides "find" capabilities. (Feel free to join in and help grow this)
• Columns/properties of resulting Record instances are accessible via "dot" notation
• aRecord.column_name
• aRecord.JoinedLayoutName.column_name is equivalent to JoinedLayoutName::column_name
• Flex 2 applications using Flex4FileMaker are subject to Flash Player's Security sandbox rules
• The XML result set parsing works, but is probably not the most efficient and should be refactored.
• Although FileMaker.as constructor accepts a username and password, I wouldn't recommend embedding database credentials in a compiled SWF, but rather accept credentials in the application.

The compiled library can be downloaded and the source is available primarily from the Google Code SVN repository, but has also been published for viewing.

Many thanks to Abdul Qabiz for publishing his HTTPURLLoader that facilitates BASIC HTTP Authentication.

Click here to launch an example application using Flex4FileMaker. Right-click on the application to view and download the source or alternatively download the entire FlexBuilder project source here or from SVN

Enjoy!