Flex on Rails: Building Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex 3 and Rails 2

3 Flex with RESTful Services

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 ...