The majority of work I do is Flash/Flex and Rails so ActiveRecord, which is the M in the Rails MVC, is really the only part of Rails I use. I’ve always wished I could get ‘Rails Lite’ (In this case Camping doesn’t count) and just use ActiveRecord to pass data back and forth. My wish has come true as I found out about RubyAMF (via FlexOnRails). RubyAMF and a database are all you need to use Flash Remoting with Ruby as RubyAMF has it’s own servlet or can integrate with Apache or Lighttpd.

But what if you don’t use Ruby? ActiveRecord is a pattern and not language specific. I’ve been doing some research on a PHP ActiveRecord solution for Flash Remoting because of the speed increases that are possible with AMFPHP 2.0. PHP Doctrine was the closest PHP ActiveRecord implementation I could find to the one in Rails. However, the future of AMFPHP is now up in the air as Patrick Minnault is retiring as a programmer to become a Neuro Scientist! I always knew he was too smart to be a programmer, actually he still supports the NDP in Canada so he can’t be that bright :P

I’m sure WebORB for PHP could be used with PHP Doctrine, maybe if I wish hard enough someone will figure it out for me.