Working With Rails

Currently working with:

Netzke a Ruby on Rails framework based on ExtJS (http://blog.writelesscode.com/)

Radiant CMS

Spree eCommerce

A brief history:

Started out as a programmer on IBM mainframes using primarily Cobol.

Believed that the ‘mainframe’ way of thinking was ignoring the oncoming wave of everyday people owning and using a computer. My initial break from ‘Mainframes’ was with Convergent Technologies (CTOS). They didn’t really see the wave coming either. They should have been THE PC. But we got Microsoft.

Web programming stated way back with PHP. Developed one of the early CMS systems using open source for the biggest Credit Union in Australia. Wasn’t really happy with PHP either and started working with Alex Black on ‘BinaryCloud’ an attempt at creating a real framework for PHP, many very smart people put in a lot of work into this. But a couple of years later Alex announced he was abandoning the project as someone had already developed a system that was what BinaryCloud was to be and more. That was Ruby On Rails. I have not used PHP since.

I then wanted GUI for my systems. Rails with baked in Ajax and Prototype was a good start, but I felt it needed more so I started using Adobe Flex. That worked out pretty well I wrote some fairly sophisticated systems with it mainly by hacking it together. I needed a framework, so I started changing the code over to Cairngorm, then later PureMVC. None of this was really satisfactory. My next few projects I used RestfulX, that had a lot of promise. Then Html5 started getting some headway specifically with “Sproutcore” I looked at a lot of systems that integrated Ruby Rails into ExtJs.

The clear winner for me was and is “Netzke”