Bye Bye Crutches

Now that school is on a hiatus, I decided to move on from the bookstore example and begin to develop my own application. At the moment, my idea is to have an online site to organize your information, but we'll see how that evolves as time goes by.

One of the things I was afraid about when I first got the book "Agile Web Development with Rails" was that it would be out of date by the time I really wanted to start programming. But luckily, it wasn't too bad. Actually, the only big thing I've come across that wasn't in the book was the whole migration thing: where you're able to create tables and columns in Ruby instead of the SQL language of the specific database installation. But the only way I found out about that was by watching the new screencast. So come to think of it, there are probably many other new things added that I have not come across. Time to check out the change log...

The most satisfying aspect of developing my site has got to be when I integrated Ajax. Don't worry, I realize that unnecessary use of flashy things on a site does more harm than good. Ajax was definitely a plus, honest. But anyways, when I saw the page update asynchronously, it was a big accomplishment. I felt like I had finally caught up to the forefront of internet technology. I was doing things that only "cutting edge" websites are now starting to do. And Ruby on Rails made it just too easy to do. Especially with the Prototype framework, soon everybody and their mom will start taking advantage of Ajax. But by then, I'll move on to the next cool thing :-).

But for now, I'm focusing on finishing a prototype of my application, so I can put it up online. Then we'll take it from there.