I’m looking at Rails development as a backend to a Flex application and am trying to figure out the communication layer between the Rails app and the Flash Player. All of the things I am finding suggest using SOAP web services to communicate.
However, Flash supports AMF which is nice and fast (and native). Is there any way of communicating over AMF from a Rails app, whilst supporting all the ‘nice’ things about AMF (automatic type conversion, data push etc).
There is WebORB or RubyAMF which you can use to respond in AMF from Rails, the approaches are a bit different for each one so it depends on your needs. RubyAMF is discussed in the closing chapters of the Flexible Rails eBook which is a good resource on using Rails with Flex.