As I’m starting to add Ruby to my toolkit, my colleague Trevor has begun to develop interfaces into Life Science database applications using Flex built on top of Ruby Rails. Rails handles the transport of XML data to and from appropriate databases to populate components of the Flex application interface. The result is a clean looking, interactive application, that runs in any browser. The time saved building and testing the UI is substantial.

Flex doesn’t require a special server, such as JSP require Tomcat. The programmer does not have to test the interface everywhere. Rendering occurs on the client. The required Flash Player is built into most modern browser distributions.

Macromedia describes Flex as a server component that enables you to create rich presentation layers for Internet applications. Interfaces built in Flex rely on Macromedia Flash Player for display on client systems. Essential components of Flex are:

An XML language (MXML) used to describe the application interface.
An ECMA scripting language (ActionScript) used with MXML to handle user and system events or to construct complex data models.
A class library
Runtime services
A compiler that generates SWF files from MXML files.

Trevor was able to rewrite his current project interface, something that has taken months to develop, in a weekend. The prototype is remarkable.

I’ll post links to his work when it becomes publicly available.