Tag Archives: Ruby on Rails

Deliver. Now.

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Every time I talk with people about Ruby on Rails in Switzerland, I almost always get the same comments, no matter what is the background of the person I’m talking to:

Yes but… what about [scalability / performance]? [I'm sure / I've read / I think / I believe / I have dreamt] that Ruby on Rails is not as [fast / scalable / powerful] than [J2EE / .NET / PHP / ASP / CGI / WebObjects / Python / Perl]

It’s very funny indeed, for many reasons:

  1. None of these comments came from people running something like Facebook, or at least any other site with more than 10000 visits per month;
  2. None of the people who said something like the above has tried Ruby on Rails, beyond the 15 minute blog thing, which everyone seems to have done.

It seems to me that there’s a problem here. Continue reading →

Simultaneously

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Incredible. I just came accross this blog called “One Month App”. The guys from Clear Function have been working on Pulse, a web-based application, more or less at the same time as I was working on Parking Friend (from the end of September to mid-October)! Their design is nicer than mine, though :)

It is also interesting to see that their toolset is more or less the same as mine (it’s a typical Rails stack, after all) but I’ve used Inkscape and Gimpshop instead of the Adobe Creative Suite applications (which I do not own). In any case, it is possible: you can create really complex applications in Rails, in a really small amount of time. This is not something that all development stacks allows you to do!

Congratulations for the release to the team of Clear Function!

Riding the Rails Again

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It feels soooooo good to :)

Let me introduce you to Parking Friend. This website, which I had the pleasure to design and develop, belongs to some friends of mine, currently starting their own valet parking service in Geneva. Located not far from the airport, Jake, Dieter and their team will take care of your car for a small daily fee, for as many days as needed, meeting you at the airport (or anywhere else, for that matter) when you leave and when you return, cleaning up your car and even doing some shopping for you if you need. Handy, easy, relaxing.

Technically speaking, this is my first public, mainstream Ruby on Rails application. What can I say? It has been a delight to create by all means. It took me two weeks to do it, working… on “rails” precisely :) in the morning and evening trains while going to and from work, as well as during the weekends. Continue reading →

Inversion of Control, Ruby & Rails

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Next week I will be in Belgium working with the Thales team in Brussels, building a new software solution (for a customer of the public sector that I cannot disclose here) using the following technologies:

Personally, this seems like a rather new (Microsoft-less) way of doing a .NET application, and I like this! To understand what Spring is, I dived into Martin Fowler’s Inversion of Control (IoC) / Dependency Injection paper… not an easy trip, believe me; but a rewarding one. Continue reading →