Well I’m not sure it’s the best way but Aral Balkan’s SWX looks pretty promising. You load SWX as you would a SWF, with loadMovie, since it’s a SWF the data is Flash native and ready to go.
Right now PHP is the only support backend but Aral is looking to add the others Python, Java, .NET, and of course Ruby! A Rails version that could that could return an object and it’s ActiveRecord associations would be pretty cool.