Preface

All books have a low point during writing, and this book had a lower one than most. Specifically, this book was born out of three almost simultaneous failures at the end of 2008:

• The failure of the Ruboss Framework as a commercial product
• The failure of Enterprise Flexible Rails as a book
• The failure of the format of Hello! Flex 3

In the immortal words of hip-hop superstar Friedrich Nietzsche,^[1] “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” and this perfect storm of failure that ended 2008 for me definitely made me stronger—and made Hello! Flex 4 a much better book.

¹ What, you thought I was quoting German philosopher Kanye West?

That is the short version; if you want the long one, read on...

Shortly after Flexible Rails was published by Manning in early 2008, I began working full-time on my company Ruboss and recruited a co-founder, Dima Berastau. We were bootstrapping a product called the Ruboss Framework by doing consulting. The Ruboss Framework was licensed under GPL v3 and a commercial license, so it was free for Flex and $499 for the AIR version. I wanted to market the Ruboss Framework by writing a book about it, so I discussed with Mike Stephens at Manning a sequel to Flexible Rails, titled Enterprise Flexible Rails, which would pick up where Flexible Rails left off and lead readers to using the Ruboss Framework for their Flex projects.

In parallel to my working on the Ruboss Framework and Enterprise Flexible Rails, Mike approached me in early 2008 and asked if I had any recommendations for someone to write Hello! Flex 3 for Manning. The publisher was creating a new series of books called “Hello! X,” and the format was going to be a fun, lighthearted introduction to a topic, featuring cartoons. In a true Dick Cheney moment, I said, “I pick me.” I knew J.D. Frazer (a.k.a. “Illiad,” the creator of the web comic User Friendly), so I proposed to Manning that they use User Friendly cartoons in the Hello! series and I made the introduction. Since I had just finished a book about using Flex 3 with Rails, I thought it would be fairly simple to write another one, adding cartoons and removing Rails. Just like runners at the end of a marathon, I must have been on an endorphin rush, since Hello! Flex 3 seemed easy in comparison to Flexible Rails. Mike said that they strongly discourage anyone from trying to write two books at once. However, in a moment of supreme hubris, and against Mike’s better judgment, I prevailed. So, I started writing Hello! Flex 3.

Over the course of 2008, I wrote six chapters of Hello! Flex 3, using the same iterative code example format that I had used in Flexible Rails, but with the addition of cartoons. I also wrote two chapters of Enterprise Flexible Rails. That sounds respectable, but basically it was a washout. (Hubris breeds nemesis, after all!)

First, Enterprise Flexible Rails was selling moderately well for a niche book, but with the direction it was headed, it didn’t have a broad enough appeal. Also, the book was not progressing fast enough. It turned out that I didn’t have the time, so Mike was right: I shouldn’t have attempted two books at once. Mike and I agreed to cancel Enterprise Flexible Rails. (Also, Ruboss subsequently changed the name of the Ruboss Framework to the RestfulX framework, made the product free, and changed the license to the MIT license.)

Second, Hello! Flex 3 had an identity crisis. We realized that “Flexible Rails plus cartoons” did not make a good Hello! series book. Hello! Flex 3 was going to need to be completely rewritten—both to update the format to one better suiting the series, and also to rewrite the book to target Flex 4 (which was due to be released in the second half of 2009).

So, Hello! Flex 3 was scrapped, and the code in its six chapters was used as the basis of one chapter in this book: the “SocialStalkr” example in chapter 7, which I rewrote to use Flex 4 and the Spark components. I also realized that the best format for the remainder of the book was that of a fake workshop. I thought it would be funny to do a cartoon mashup, so I drew a stick figure (yes, inspired by that famous web comic) to represent me giving a workshop to the User Friendly cartoon characters. This would be a meeting of Web 2.0 (the stick figure) and Web 1.0 (the User Friendly characters), with lots of opportunity for humor as well as instruction.

I spent the next three months working ridiculous hours, writing chapters 1–6 from scratch. I got the book done in late summer 2009, and we proceeded to edit and produce the book. Manning excels at the production process, which is one reason their books have such a great reputation.

The story ended happily—and I feel that a really good book is the result.