write an application on Rails

i’m on a project on rails

This goal has been on my 43things list for an entire YEAR, and on my mind for much longer. But, I can finally say I have an app up and running… and I even got paid to do it! I’m where I want to be now – I’ve done freelance web development with Rails and can even list it on my resume.

As a professional web developer locked into Microsoft antiquated technology like old-school Visual Basic and ASP, I can say that Ruby on Rails is a godsend. The major strengths are that it gets you up and running quickly and it makes maintenance easy. In my day job with ASP, those things are a nightmare.

I love rails, but I cannot use it at work. However, there is no doubt in my mind that it’s ideas are going to be integrated into whatever future framework becomes the next enterprise standard. It seems like bunches of frameworks are sprouting up now for JavaEE and .NET and PHP, so I know things are going to get better down the road for this profession.

Yet, I feel like this whole style of development is still immature. Even after the Firefox revolution, the web browser itself is still clunky and needs hacks (ajax) to be somewhat interactive. Don’t get me wrong: for a developer, web forms beat desktop clients like Java Swing any day.

Rails is definitely a HUGE step forward, but what comes next? There is no doubt in my mind that the web will be used as a computing platform for a long time in the future. But I can see it eventually going the way of COBOL and being succeeded by something better.

When i first discovered RoR i was amazed by it’s simplicity. The examples were impressive and everything seemed so easy.
After playing with it for couple of days i realized that there’s a lot more under the hood that i wanted to get to know.
I’m currently reading Agile Web Development with Rails and I’m playing with my pet project at the same time. I want to emphasize here that after the first impressions were gone, I’m still thrilled by the level of details and simplicity put in almost all aspects of this framework.

I don’t have any excuses for why it took me so long to write a Ruby on Rails web application, but I can now say I am currently managing two live rails projects!

The first one was released at the end of 2007, and I recently updated it with new features. The second app I rolled out yesterday, and still have a lot of work to do on it. This has been free lance web development work, that I found by suggesting ideas to different people that I know.

Rails does take some time to learn, but you will definitely appreciate this framework if you have any web development background. The database work is literally invisible, and makes maintenance extremely easy.

Even if you’re not planning to do it for a living or for anything else, you will learn a lot on the journey of completing a rails app and deploy it to a remote server, I know because I’ve been learning a lot even before I completing my first app, way more than what I learn in years in my day job.

Its been so long since I’ve been here. If there was one reason for that its how much I’ve accomplished this goal! I’m a freelance Rails dev now, and I love it

I got caught up in the trend train. I certainly do want to code more, but not necessarily with Ruby on Rails.

I just finished an online contact database for a non-profit. Not particularly complicated, but it did have a few complexities, like role-based access control and scholar exports to CSV for import into a legacy database.

It took me a full 4 months, but I finally completed the Depot sample application in the Agile Web Development book. Worth it? Absolutely, if I actually make use of it. My goal is to implement a production Ruby on Rails project… otherwise, I will forget all the stuff I just learned, which was a big time investment.

I’m a professional web developer, and have been stuck using Visual Basic (components) and ASP (front-ends) for 5 years now. Using Rails has been eye-opening, and yet depressing at the same time: it is such an improvement over what we’re doing now, but it’ll be a gigantic problem to try to convince management to let us use it.

Our “enterprise strategy” (i.e. mandate) is to migrate all our existing apps to Java Enterprise Edition. I’m keeping an eye on jruby as a possibility, since it could mean that our existing JavaEE web servers could be co-opted to run Ruby on Rails apps.

I’m thinking of doing a “proof of concept” app with the RoR framework for our team, but nothing is solidified yet.

All of my non-blog websites (movie database, photolog, photo gallery, little apps) are now powered by a self-written rails app. No PHP in sight! Also extensions to my blog software of choice (simplelog) to allow OpenID logins for commenting.

Well, except for an on-release script on some static assets… but that doesn’t count.