Should I put my flex project within my rails project?

Question

I have a project with a RESTful Rails back-end and a Flex front-end, first time for me with this combo and I debating whether to put the flex source somewhere inside the Rails folder hierarchy or making it a separate project. If I do so which folder would be most suitable /lib?

Also be doing one click deployment with Vlad which can also compile the flex app and dump it in the public folder.

Or does anyone have any good reasons why the flex project shouldn't reside within the Rails folder hierarchy?

Cheers

Answer 1

From personal experience, it's fine in the Rails folder structure. We have a "/flexsrc" folder a the rails project level in git, and when we build, the swf and related files are dumped to the /public area. It's been this way for a while, and there's no apparent drawback.

I think it would be more of a hassle to have two source depots.

Answer 2

(disclaimer, I've only used Flex with PHP and Java, I'm not terribly familiar with Rails so I can only really address the last part of the question).

My general experience is that it is best to keep both Flex and its hosting server components in the same source tree and svn project. Unless you have reason to believe that you are going to need a different server at some point, I can't really imagine any reason why you wouldn't want to:

• Keeping them in the same project makes it easier to automate builds (in Java definitely, and it sounds the same in Rails).
• If they are in the same tree, then it is easier for other developers to work on the same code without using SVN externals.
• Placing them as separate projects can complicate compiler arguments for RemoteObjects and the like

Answer 3

This is the way I do it:

AppRepo 

     FlexAppFolder/ 

     RailsAppFolder/

I like the Glenn's approach, but as ChrisInCambo said he's using a RESTful Rails back-end, which means that Rails has a bunch of services to expose and which means that the services could be consumed from different clients (front-ends), maybe not now, but in a future.

Another approach could be

RailsAppRepo
FlexAppRepo

and if you're using git you can do:

git submodule add backend git://your_backend_repo

or an svn external

Any ideas?