Yep you heard right, Free! Well restricted in the free versions but not much. With the release of Flex 2 came the need for AMF3 compatable solutions. Recently I have been hunting round for one that allowed me to use Ruby on rails along with AMF. There are a few opensource options underway but by the looks of it the guys at WebOrb are well underway. They alreay have versions in .NET and Java so its safe to say they know what they are doing. I got a comment posted one of my other blog entries and I really cant believe I hadnt heard of this sooner. I realise these guys used to be FlashOrb but its all new and shinny.

"Free open-source implementation of Flash Remoting in Ruby."
"Can be deployed into any Rails-enabled application to expose it to Flash Remoting and Flex clients."
"Provides full implementation of Flash Remoting and Flex Data Services (AMF0 and AMF3, Data Management)"

If you head over to http://www.themidnightcoders.com/index.htm  and check it out, they say that the PHP and the ROR version is coming Q3 06 (never really liked that whole quarter thing but I spose it means there isnt a solid date). I cant wait though, seeing how easy and fast ROR is along with AMF and some flex (my goodness I sound like a marketing person lol) I will be making some cool stuff…..quickly.

Best of all the same packages that provide the AMF are specifically designed to intergrate with AJAX calls. So you get the best of all the Web 2.0 terms to sell your client on buying the full version. The have plenty of demoslive on their server. Showing that pretty much the same methods can be accessed via both AMF and ajax calls.

So put this one in your "to keep an eye on" box and hold your breath. 

Well now back from Castaway island in Fiji and Im back into work. Man it was amazing, great place to take a vacation, I highly recommend it. Its probably reasonably priced for you yanks out there too.

Awsome scenery

You cant really see it but there are hundreds of small fish behind me

A very dangerous NZ fish not normally found in Fiji but my Dad was lucky to snap this shot of the rare white tee-shirted puffed checked xsiveious fish

After such a nice relaxation period it pretty hard to get ramped up back into work, but there are many little projects on the go. There has been some advances with Videmo.co.nz. My mobile phone multimedia message to website gallery project I made for a bit of a play. But instead of static websites it heading more towards the live area, More to come I promise.

Also on the radar at the moment is keeping an eye on tickle.co.nz (the ruby on rails and flash website we released before I ran away on holiday). We asked for feedback from the users and we got it, although alot of people seem to check common curtasies (spelling?) at the door when sending an email in the heat of the moment. It can be frustraiting sometimes and opens my eyes for when I make comments on others websites. I also posted on a couple of the local ruby on rails news groups and got some great feedback (thanks guys). The PDF engine is processing data from flash and creating purdy little print ready pdfs well. And I love the check out system each time I use it. Its one place I really like Ajax. When you have a page showing 300 images in your cart ready to be printed the last thing you want is to be refreshing the page with every change.

So with that I guess I had better get back to. Glad to be back with internet now though lol ) 

Yep for peeps out there doing Ruby on Rails with flash there is a new version of Rad Rails. This release fixes the biggest pain in the a$$ bug. It used to be for some random reason rhtml pages wouldnt compile, and each page refresh gave a different error. Well this was related to tab characters being in a strange encoding which crashed the ruby server. This has been fixed in release 0.6.4.

Go get the update now if you want to save your hair. 

Just a heads up with something I found recently, and I hope this gets spidered by google because I was banging my head against a wall.

I have been playing with flash and ruby on rails together alot and today stumbled across a problem. The situation was in rails I was requesting a remote URL through Net::Http class and getting the response, but kept on getting an error which read:

NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn’t expect it!
The error occured while evaluating nil.verify_mode

It seems when your updating ruby not all comes out well and I found the answer at : http://brantinteractive.com/index.php?p=53

After removing rails and re-installing all was well. Once again just a heads u, and I hope to reveal the project to the world soon ) It seems once you get past the initail Wow of ruby scaffolding there are plenty of little suprises to catch you out. So its a love hate relationship. I still really miss the great IDE that Visual studio has but am really enjoying ROR again after the initial bang head against wall stage. And if you feeling game check out:

RubyOnRails (1.1) and Flex (2.0): Pt 1 & RubyOnRails (1.1) and Flex (2.0): Pt 2 for a bit of a look in to see how cool it can be. I hope to post a bit of a tut on setting up ROR on a windows box and running it in a clustered server setup with speeds matching lighttpd thats 70-150 req/sec for dynamic full blown rails pages.