Peter Williams

My very first Rails app went live today. The project had a very tight deadline and we managed to go live only three days late which, in my book, is on time. Interestingly, this is the very first application that I have deployed live on the Internet. Prior to this all my web application experience came from working on a web application framework. That was interesting work but it is a bit little different feeling when someone else actually does the deployment on their hardware, data and application code. I like this feeling of having accomplished something “real”, for lack of a better word. I think that feeling of realness come from the fact that this app solves an actual business problem and that is available to the public.

I have learned a lot in the last couple of weeks. I might blog about some of the in more depth at some point in the future but I want to get some things off my chest before I forget them.

• Ruby on Rails — After doing a project from start to deployment I still think it is really nice. It’s fast to develop in an overall a really solid platform. I still don’t like those URIs, though.
• Lighttpd — Seems reasonably fast and solid once you get it configured but the documentation is teh suck. Many fairly important configuration options are not even mentioned in the documentation. And that configuration language leaves a lot to be desired. On the other hand I am comparing it to Apache, which is a tough act to follow as far as easy of use and documentation go .
• CSS — Sweet. Absolutely brilliant. But how on earth did we get to version 3 and still not have a parent pseudo class?
• JavaScript — This is a very nice little language. Really nice semantics. Would be nicer if it did not have those ugly curly braces all over the place, but if you skip the semi-colons (and they are, in fact, optional in most situations) the code can look half decent.
• IE — That annoying other browser that really, absolutely work. I know that complaining about IE incompatibilities is passé but how are child selectors not supported?
• Firefox — What can I say… Get it, use it, love it.
• Commuting by bus — No matter what is going on you are guaranteed 1 hour of sleep each day. Priceless.

Over all the technology stack is really nice. There are a few rough edges here and there but it is eminently workable and the experience of building an app with the set of technologies is mostly about building the app, not about spend excessive amounts of time learning the infrastructure.