Jeff Beard

Jeff On Ruby On Rails

My ex-wife is the Executive Director at The Carriage House Center for the Homeless in Boulder. I help take care of the network there along with a couple of other volunteers and provide some technical direction for the organization. The Carriage House had a need for a small application and as is the case for many agencies such as the Carriage House they didn’t really have the budget for the project. Once that was clearly determined, I decided that it would be a good opportunity to write a Ruby on Rails application since I have a little wiggle room in my schedule.

So, being a very framework focused developer with an aversion to writing unnecessary code, I did a lot of research to find out what the Rails world had to offer in this regard. I had already worked out the data model for the application so what I was hoping for was something that would generate the CRUD functionality. I initially used the Rails scaffold generator to gen up the scaffolding. That worked and I had a working CRUD application at that point. In fact, I ran another script (plugin), changed 2 lines of code in my controllers and had authentication deployed (Acts as Authenticated). How cool is that? It was ugly but my wife was thrilled.

Of course that left me with UI work (read CSS) which isn’t a strong suite for me right now.

Then I came across ActiveScaffold. After learning that I had to remove my view files and the all of the generated code in the controllers generated by the Rails generator, I pretty much had a functional and reasonably good looking application. Its a very grid focused UI which is a little strange but it works and I basically met the requirements in a with minimum of development time (I spent most of my time of time reading up on how to harness the Rails magic) Anyway, I liked it so much that the next time I have a project of this size, I’ll use Rails again.

As an aside, I used the Aptana IDE for this project which I liked a lot. Its buggy for sure but it did work and it has a nice JavaScript debugger as well. Of course its Eclipse based which make it a shoe-in for this fan. Jack Slocum of Ext fame used Aptana and its support for Adobe AIR to build a nice desktop TODO list application. I think I’ll look in that direction next time I have a small project to do. More on this in another post.