Flex-on-Rails, iteration one

I’ve completed the first iteration of a Flex-on-Rails application, and had a lot of fun doing so. The application is called Index Cards, and it’s designed to be a generic study aid. The metaphor is simple: on one side of the index card, you write the name of a concept that you wish to learn, and on the back you write a definition and/or description of that concept. Of course, you’ll have a separate set of index cards for each subject that you study, and within each subject you will further divide your index cards based on topics or categories. You put all of the cards for each topic or category in a rubber band to keep your cards from becoming disorganized. For example, if the subject you’re studying is elementary statistics, you might have one rubber band to hold cards with descriptive analysis concepts, another rubber band for probability, and so on.

Unfortunately, I haven’t lined up Rails hosting as yet, so I don’t have an online demo to play with. However, you can download the source code here. Please let me know if you have any feedback (criticisms, suggestions, kudos, etc.). Most of the code is still uncommented, so feel free to ping me with any questions as well.

In addition to being my first significant Rails application, this is also my first use of the PureMVC framework. I will admit that this slowed me down much more than expected, as I had some trouble wrapping my mind around PureMVC. However, now that I’m starting to get the hang of it, I think I like it. I will have a better idea of how much I like it when I start adding functionality. I’ll be posting comments here as I build out the app, so stay tuned.

As it stands, the application has the basic required functionality: you can create, update, and delete index cards, and you can flip through the cards to study them. However, I plan to add (at bare minimum) the ability to study only one rubber band at a time. I also hope to add user management and login functionality so that there could be multiple users of the same instance, as well as different ways of studying with the index cards (multiple choice etc.).

Below is a list of resources that were instrumental in getting me to this point.

Rails:
Agile Web Development with Rails (of course) by Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson, et al
Rolling with Ruby on Rails Revisited by Bill Walton and Curt Hibbs
Integrating Flex 2 and Ruby on Rails by Derek Wischusen

PureMVC:
PureMVC Best Practices by Cliff Hall
Cafe Townsend demo by Michael Ramirez (This is an adaptation of the Cairngorm demo for PureMVC)