May 30, 2008
Ruby on Rails and Ajax
My requirments: I want to allow artists and galleries to publish their profiles on our website, http://www.santa-fe-art.com.
I also want to experiment with Ruby-on-Rails and AJAX, and in general make a client facing application that is pleasant to use. Some background:
I am not a web developer. I am kinda sorta a software developer, really more of an application programer. But in particular I haven't done much with UI's. When building UI's I have always re-used whatever is possible... and kind didn't like the work too much. Some UI software I have worked with:
- Siebel - does all the hardwork for you, and you can only change it so much. More important to know the programming and relational database, application layers than worry about the look, as it will always look the same depending on version.
- VA2- My custom software package I built and have sold to a number of companies. Used a plugin for Microsoft MMC there, to the look of VA2 was really delivered via the MMC API. Code was written in VB6.. not exactly web programming. I wrote the code to provide functionality, but the reason I liked that MMC UI was all the built in features and it did not look like a VB app.
- Perl has been my programming language of... but I use it more for back end stuff than web UI stuff, last time I did that was back in '99.
So, what the hell happened in the web world? Developing web pages used to be HTML, yeah a little javascript. But now the "Browser is the Operating System", according to Google, and they may be right. AJAX, plugins, seems like you can do anything with a browser. Or, if you can't program for the browser, you can't do anything. Which sucks.
In an effort to upgrade my web skillz, I'm going to try to use Ruby-On-Rails and Ajax to easily allow Artists and Galleries users to add a blurb about themselves on our new website.
I have gotten as far as resarching Ruby-On-Rails, and knowing I want to do not only the DB work to support this, but provide a pleasing and fast Ajaxish UI, so users can easily add items.
I found the following tutorial which seems like a good start: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/09/rails_ajax.html?page=1