Semantici.st

This week I wrote a simple, but fully functional, Rails application in my spare time of one day. This included time spent writing tests and deploying it using Phusion Passenger and Capistrano.

The application itself is an, uhh, internal one for use by people at my day job. I call it ‘failcount’, and it tracks the amount of FAIL we’re collectively experiencing and generates a green/amber/red status. Pretty simple, but with a different framework and a different language it would have taken me much longer. It was good to create a custom XML output for the first time and to use some AJAX magic for a load-on-scroll pagination effect.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been more and more impressed with Ruby on Rails and related tools ability to take the pain out of development. Deployment is bliss with Capistrano and Passenger. Version control is easy – but still powerful – with git. Ruby’s syntax is clean and readable. All-in-all it’s a wonderful combination and I think my application in a day might be the perfect example of how these tools can come together and let you express your ideas with a minimum of frustration.

I intend to adapt failcount to support multiple groups/organisations, and at that point I’ll make the deployment more widely available, and either drop the code on my own public git repo or finally get around to signing up for github. That won’t happen until at least next week, as I need to spend some time this weekend doing admin work for Xybur and making a presentation for the Edinburgh Mac User Group’s meet-up on Tuesday, where I’m going to talk about how I made a MacBook Mini.