Invoke ActiveRecord Models Directly from Flex

I was doing some work for a client this past week and we were discussing how exactly the MVC design pattern should be subdivided when integrating a Flex client with Rails. Of course the "View" is the Flex UI, and the Model is the data layer on the server. However, the "Controller" piece could easily be on either the client or the server. If this layer is pushed to the Flex client one option is using a framework like Carnigorm (sp?) that provides a "FrontController" for directing requests to the server. However, when this layer resides on the server, when building a WebORB on Rails app, this logic typically manifests itself in the form of a Service (dropped into /app/services) that directs "actions" directly to instance methods just like a true Rails controller.

So what is the point of all this? Well... I still prefer keeping the "controller" logic on the server, but for those that want to push as much processing to the client as possible I've added a couple features to WebORB for Rails that will make direct invocations to Rails models more natural. Most notably you can now invoke class methods on a server-side class as well as expect all of the "dynamic" methods that ActiveRecord supports (like find_all_by_x_and_y) to work as expected. So for example, you can now make a call like:

remoteObject.find_all_by_keyword("Ruby")

...and after mapping this remote object to a Book model in the remoting config, you could expect that a list of books to be returned to the client. Pretty sweet.

One other minor feature that was added is the ability for Rails models to be mapped to a static type on the client (via a [RemoteClass] tag) instead of simply stashing these objects into the standard dynamic ObjectProxy type.

Anywho... I still like introducing the control layer on the server via a proper "service".... but for those of you that want to push the V & C to the client you can now invoke the M directly to get at your data. Gotta love it.