The folks who organized Rails Day 2005 have posted a Post mortem of Ruby on Rails. Some interesting stats on the number of participants and number of new Rails Open Source projects!

I will post my thoughts along with a link to our application later today.

I’m very pleased to say that our web app is complete! Well almost – the design is done and the Rails code is done. Now we’ll spend the next two hours integrating them then spend our last hour migrating it up to the competition server.

Tomorrow, I will put our development box on the public internet (right now it’s just on my home LAN) and we’d love to hear your feedback.

Well – It’s been ten hours since my last post, so it is fair to say we ran into some trouble. Let me just say that when working with Rails, you pay very close attention to the “Convention over Configuration” mantra. If you don’t follow the naming conventions of Rails, you’re only asking for trouble. Over the past 5 hours, we had to completely rewrite all the work that dave did in the first 12 hours!

Good news is that we learned alot about Rails, and discovered truely how magical it is.

Gels continues to do awesome work. We’re really under the gun, so I don’t expect to post too many more times before 9pm PST.

Things are moving right along! The client side is coming along just swell. Here is another snippet that I can show you where I am using CSS and Javascript to create an interactive rating system. The icons are property of Microsoft, but those are the one that I used for devlelopment. Gels is going to create some special ones for me.

Gels is pretty happy with her comp for the site which you can view here

Dave continues to filter data.

Who was I kidding anyhow! There’s no way I could stay up for 24 hours! Gels and I took 2 hour nap while Dave continued to work on the controllers for filtering results.

We’re all feeling pretty good now and ready to put in some serious hours until the contest ends in 14 hours!

Dave continues to amaze me with the speed in which he is adding features to our web app using Rails. It really is a magical framework!

We will be releasing our final application under a CC license, so y’all will be able to download and play with the code in our Recommendation system!

Dave just told me that the entire data entry section contains about 30 lines of Ruby/Rails code. Pretty impressive for a CRUD operation. For those of you not aware what CRUD is, it stands for *C*reate, *R*etrieve, *U*pdate and *D*elete.

The overall design is looking pretty sweet – I’ll try to upload something next hour.

Here is a link to some of the DOM work I’ve been doing.

Still no progress to show, but the small pieces are coming together. The design is starting to look good, the main data entry is complete. Hopefully a comp to post next hour.

Red Bull is pretty rude tasting! But it does what it advertises – I feel pretty awake!

The Red Bull is being consumed in copious amounts! It’s midnight PST and everyone has already been awake for 18 hours!

Gels is still working out ideas for the main page. We decided to call our service “recommendr” so she has some really cool ideas to work the r’s into the design.

Dave continues to work with Rails and has the main controller almost ready.

I am continuing to work on some client-side javascript to make a “better” interface for adding tags. It’s been one thing that has always bothered me about most sites that make use of tags. It is never really easy or efficient to add them. I hope to change that!

Another update next hour!

Gels made it – her bus was late! We’re off to a good start and everybody is quietly working away. Gels is designing some comps for the overall look and feel of the site, while Dave is working on the model, controller and view for the main data entry page. I’ve just completed our first SVN checkin (we must do 12 over the duration of the competition).

More to report later and hopefully a comp for you to look at!

Well we’re one hour in! Good news is our rails framework and database are all setup. In fact, Dave already has our user authentication system up and running. One of the beautiful features of Rails are scripts called generators. Basically, generators automatically create code for you. The login generator, generates all the Rails code for an authenticaiton system. Simply point it to your user table and you’re good to go.

I am working on some client side DOM/AJAX code and that is going well.

The bad news, Gels, our “ace in the can designer” has not shown up yet! She had to take the bus from Victoria to Nanaimo (about a 3 hour trip) so hopefully she will be here soon!