Flex on Rails: Flex with RESTful Services
- Chapter 3: Flex with RESTful Services
- Creating the Stock Portfolio Rails Application
- Accessing our RESTful Application with Flex
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
More frequently than not, Rails applications are written using a RESTful approach, which provides a coherent way of organizing your controller actions for applications that serve HTML pages. It also has the added benefit of exposing your application as a service that can be accessed via an API. This capability is important because it enables our Flex application to communicate with the Rails application by passing XML data using the Flex HTTPService components. In Chapter 2, Passing Data with XML, we looked at the underlying mechanisms of using the HTTPService component and the implications of using XML. In this chapter, we will look at the larger picture of how to access a RESTful Rails application and how to consume nested resources with custom verbs, which are common in RESTful applications. You should still be able to follow this chapter, even if you are not familiar with RESTs. This chapter will guide you through building the “Stock Portfolio” application, which will introduce REST concepts, such as CRUD verbs and nested resources, and use custom REST actions. You will see how to code this application from both a Rails and a Flex perspective.
Let’s jump right into it.