Ok, so I wasn't far off at all.  Take a look at Rails as a middleware, its often overlooked in this role.

Flex is sotra flash on steroids. But if you have an aversion to that, ajax, json, etc can be substituted.

What I was suggesting was not to write your app in Ruby, it was to use rails to handle the communications with your end clients.  You could even have multiple clients, using different technologies, and even different communication protocols by using Rails as a muddleware.

Just trying ti give you ideas to resolve your development design.

Kevin Fries

On Oct 15, 2010 10:29 AM, "Ed Knapp" <catbertek@hotmail.com> wrote:

The original impetus for this effort was two fold.
1. updated user experience since we are rolling out a much more capable site to replace a very simple one.
2. shifting our design methodology to MVC (Model-View-Controller)

our programmers have all of the back end coding under control and we were just looking for
someone to literally just build the front end in whatever tools and code that worked best.
We wanted to avoid flash and that left us with HTML5, AJAX, JSON, javascript and everything
you mentioned.  When I think of non-proprietary development, I think of PLUG.  I have met
a number of very capable people here and wanted to meet my goals and support the local
community at the same time.

In all candor, we have gotten a good number of proposals for this work and when I compare
the companies that were sent to me by the executive and marketing groups of my company
against the companies/contractors that I contacted through my efforts here,  the local
community stacks up very well indeed.  This group is full of very skilled professionals
and I enjoyed talking with all of them.

Ed


Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2010 09:55:34 -0600
Subject: Re: RE: looking for recommendations for web development companies
From: kfries6@gmail.com

To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us

I started following this thread late, but it sounds as if you are looking for a flex+rails type of s...


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