Working With Rails

Before I Die

Before I Die was an attempt to further learn the Facebook API as well as Rails. The idea behind the site was basically to bring the functionality of the excellent 43things into the walled garden of Facebook. It worked out pretty well and the application is still experiencing slow but steady growth in its user base.

Because it was a relatively simple project, it was also a chance to try some experimentation, going above and beyond what Rails provides by writing a “superframework” on top of Rails. The end result was much like what Hobo (http://hobocentral.net/) is trying to do with Rails, including generating forms and migrations directly from model definitions. While I was pleased with the end result of this approach, I later concluded, beyond the additional performance hit my framework caused, that maintaining such a framework and keeping it up to date with forthcoming versions of Rails was too much work to justify when all I really wanted to do was create applications. As one of my colleagues said in his infinite wisdom: you can design frameworks or design applications, but not both.

Ultimately, I consider this project a success and a further learning experience.

Homepage: http://apps.facebook.com/before_i_die/