Flex has revolutionized the development of rich Internet applications, giving developers the framework necessary to easily create ever more powerful applications. Components form an essential part of this framework, and once you understand how to fully use them, your productivity and creativity will be taken to a whole new level. Flex 3 Component Solutions will show just what you can achieve with components and exactly how to achieve it.

You'll see just how simple it is to use components to create amazing interfaces for your applications be they media players, data visualizations, 3D graphicsthe list is long. Finally, there'll be times when you'll want to or have no alternative but to create your own components. This book will show you how to do this for your own ends, or so you can contribute to the Flex component community by distributing them.

Flex 3 Component Solutions is a tour de force of components, and all of these components are demonstrated using real-world Flex code that you can use as starting points for your own applications. Take what you learn for this book, and then go out and create your own amazing interfaces quickly and easily: reuse, re-purpose, redesign, and do it all faster and with greater quality control than you ever thought possible.

The Essential Guide to Flex and Rails takes you through a set of practical scenarios that present the combination of these two technologies in the best possible light. Each chapter shows how easy it is to connect Flex to web server applications, particularly ones written in Rails. Flex provides a wealth of Rich Internet Application tools to augment the Ajax work Rails developers are already doing. And Rails is the ideal backend for Flex applications. Throughout the book, you will create such applications as a dynamic 3D viewer, a YouTube-style video player, 3D charts pulling data from Rails, and interfaces for quickly searching, sorting and grouping data. Shows how to combine the toolset of Flex with a Rails backend Simple projects get you started creating real world applications straight away Use Flex to build widgets that work together with Rails to go where traditional DHTML cannot What you'll learn Inspirational examples that provide new ways of working with web applications. New insights into how to use Flex to talk to web server applications. Novel patterns for accessing data in Rails applications. Handy tools for developing Rails applications quickly. Strategic insight into the pros and cons of Flex versus Ajax. Methods of integrating security into your applications. Who is this book for? This book is ideally suited to both Flex and Rails developers. If you are a Flex developer it offers enough Rails code and content to provide a solid backend for your applications. If you are a Rails developer it presents even more opportunities to extend your Web 2.0 functionality.