For the past six months I’ve had the pleasure of working with Rails in my spare time. I’ve read several books, and written several applications for personal use. Soon, I will begin to put most of my spare time toward a Rails application I hope to release to the general public. As well, I will begin to share more of my Rails experiences on my blog. (Watch for new posts on getting started with Rails, like Ruby on Rails - Terms and Concepts).
I remember well the early days of cgi programming when I wrote my first Perl web applications. Then I transitioned to some kind of Oracle web procedures (I forget the real name) for some larger applications for Fortune 500 companies first getting onto the web (ex. Lucent Technologies). Eventually I did Flash and Java applets as they first came out. I made the move to Java (beyond the little applets I’d done) when Sun released the first beta specs of JavaServer Pages, in late 1998. In fact, thanks to the beauty of Internet archives I found this post written by none other than myself while working at Cox Target Media in 1999. (Guess I don’t have to worry about proving I’ve been doing JSP since it first came out). I have been involved in Java web application development ever since. I didn’t take an interest in .NET, and didn’t pay much attention to ColdFusion. I’ve done some PHP, mostly for small solutions and to customize my WordPress blogs. But, for 99% of my web software development in the last 8 years, I have stayed committed to Java.

When I took my second look at Rails about six months ago, and this time, really tried to discover what it was all about, I was really hooked. It made simple so many of the common every day tasks I’ve been doing for years. Ruby really made sense as a language and Rails as a framework. I have a lot to compare to it, and so far I’ve been very impressed with how well thought out it is.

In this series of Rails posts, I’m not going to take time to bash Java or any other languages and frameworks. I still believe Java is a great development platform that fulfills real software development requirements. However, I don’t feel like Java is the solution in every case. I count myself as an Internet Software Developer, not as a Java Developer. I have experience with many tools, and I prefer to choose the right tool for the job at hand. I’ll leave when I would use Java vs Rails to another discussion, as the focus of these posts will be on sharing my Rails experiences, and hopefully helping some other interested Internet Software Developers get their first taste of Rails development. This will not be a discussion of which is the best development platform, but instead will simply be me sharing with you, this new exciting and beautiful web application framework. I truly haven’t had this much fun developing web applications in a long, long time.

Last week I completed the creation of an online yearbook for our son. We homeschool him and create a portfolio or yearbook each year sampling his work and the progress he’s made. This year I decided to create the yearbook online, saving paper and storage space, and allowing us to share his work with family and friends.

I created the site statically using a combination of CSS, Javascript, HTML, and Flash. You can view the site here. I thought I would share in this post, the libraries I used and what issues I had ensuring it worked cross-browser.

Technologies/Libraries Used

First, on most pages I have a photo that is rotated with a Polaroid type effect applied to it (see photo below). I could have done this in an image editor, but choose in this case (for a low-trafficked site) to use Javascript. I used the Instant.js javascript library to accomplish this effect. It’s very easy to use and I had very few problems with it (see below).

Second, to create the photo galleries used mainly in the Art and Field Trip sections (and in the World War II Day example below), I used the PostcardViewer from Airtight Interactive. Once again, I found this very easy to use. I already use Google Picassa to manage my photos, and PostcardViewer can be downloaded as a Picassa template.

Note: I highly recommend you try Picassa if you aren’t using it already.

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I’m always drawn to reviews of the best places to live (probably because I know where I currently live is not on my top 100). Money recently published a top 100 list, but unlike any previous list I’ve seen before, Money took the time to map them on a Google map. Nice use of technology. I’d much prefer to see the list that way, than to scroll through the list of 100 to see which ones I want to read about. There are some parts of the country I’m less likely to visit or move to than others, so with the map I can look for my preferred areas.

See the map at Money’s web site.