At some point when creating a Flex application you will want to update an item in the database using Rails(e.g. the details about a film).

To update a resource using REST you need to use the HTTP verb PUT, so the code below should work if we’re updating a film with ID=1:

<mx:HTTPService  id="UpdateFilm" 
           method="PUT"         
           url="films/1.xml" 
           useProxy="false" 
      ...
    </mx:HTTPService>

The manual states if useProxy=”false” you can only use GET or POST. Not particularly good if you want to get some rest in:-)

Luckily Rails has a work around for this, which is the detection of a _method parameter on the end of a URL. For example:

<mx:HTTPService  id="UpdateFilm" 
         method="POST"          
         url="films/1.xml?_method=PUT
         ....
</mx:HTTPService>

SubReview was developed using Ruby on Rails v2, Flex and Yahoo YUI.

The software design behind the scenes is roughly based on a REST based architecture. If you’ve never heard of REST before then this site has a good explanation about it.

Some of the REST resources on this site are:

assets
articles
reviews