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Developing rich Internet applications with Rails, OpenLaszlo, and Eclipse

Automate quickly with Rails

Robi Sen (robisen@gmail.com), Freelance Writer, Department13

Robi Sen is vice president of Department13 LLC, a boutique information and technology services company focusing on Fortune 1000 corporations and government organizations. He spends most of his time developing large enterprise-scale applications and has spoken extensively on the topics of enterprise application integration and service-oriented architectures.

Summary: Explore at a high level how to develop a rich Internet application using OpenLaszlo, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Eclipse to provide a common IDE to not only develop your application but also to automate many of the steps in developing a Rails or OpenLaszlo application. This will further speed up and streamline the already fast development cycle of Rails applications.

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Date: 12 May 2006
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (714 KB | 30 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

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Before you start

Ruby on Rails has over the past year become one of the fastest growing and most popular open source Web application development frameworks. But because of the focus on building HTML applications, some have criticized Rails as being inflexible. Especially with the emergence of rich Internet applications (RIAs), applications using technologies such as Flash for user interface development and XML for data transport to replicate desktop application functionality, open source developers have wondered if there is some way to easily create RIAs that can exploit the pure object-oriented language of Ruby and the unique rapid application development features of Rails.

About this tutorial

This tutorial will expose you to two of the hottest platforms in Web development: Ruby on Rails, for fun and rapid Web application development; and OpenLaszlo, the open source RIA server. You will see that creating visually appealing desktop-like applications deployed and managed over the Web can be incredibly easy with these platforms.

While this tutorial will not teach you Ruby or Laszlo, it will show how easy it is to use Rails with RIAs using the open source OpenLaszlo Presentation server and MySQL. It will also cover how to configure Eclipse to set up a Rails and Laszlo development environment, automate mundane tasks, and create a simple Laszlo client that interacts with Rails via a Representational State Transfer (REST) Web service.

Prerequisites

To get the most from this, you should have a basic understanding of programming, XML, and SQL.

System requirements

You will need the following tools:

Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) all-in-one bundle or Eclipse V3.1/3.2 with WTP and all necessary extensions
OpenLaszlo
MySQL V5.0
Ruby V1.8.4 (one-click installer)
Rails V1.0 (note that there are issues with the latest Ruby and Rails V1.1)
Java technology V1.4 or 1.5
Subversion client

A system with at least 512 MB of RAM is also required.

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