What Was Your First Rails App?
Came across an interesting thread on the Ruby-Talk google group. Eric Hegwer started it by asking the question, “What was YOUR first Ruby project?”
It’s fun seeing the wide spectrum of answers. People were using Ruby for things I would never have dreamed of.
I’d like to ask our readers a similar question: what was the first Rails app you wrote? Maybe you never made it public, but what was your first Rails project?
A full-fledged community-app for a volountary organization I’m a part of.
That also counts as my first non-weblog webapp. And it is going great.
I don’t know that they qualify as true applications, but I started a rails version of my company site as a learning experience. I also did a quick and dirty cub scout app in rails. Technically, neither are in production but both are hosted on Heroku. They are linked from my company site.
My first Rails app was a large restaurant menu index (basically a menupages clone) complete with Ajax and a ton of other Web 2.0 features. Unfortunately our client ran out of money so we never really finished, but we got really far with it.
I was added to the team on a rails project at work, so I spent an hour or two familiarizing myself with rails by writing a quick and dirty app to display the next time my bus passed the office. To add insult to injury, I populated the table of bus times by scraping the bus schedule web page with python. :)
I did a dinky app about 3 years ago for a small business owner selling quilting patterns online. It is still live today (http://www.legacyquilting.com/) and believe it or not it’s on Textdrive’s Shared Hosting. The interface needs a bit of revamp but it was a great first project to get into Rails. That was my first, and I have been coding in Rails exclusively since then.
The company I used to work for did all of its license generation for a software product offline. That is, someone would need a license, and would then either contact a developer to generate it, or would simply use some internal webapp to do it.
My first rails app automated this process. You managed clients, and people within client organizations, and could generate a license file, which would save it in the database, and then optionally send the license file to the client automatically through the rails app.
I wrote my first RoR app in January of ‘05. It’s an inventory database that allows our staff to see what items are stored in our offsite storage unit. Each entry can include a photograph of the item or its container, a name, description, tags, notes, and which department it belongs to.
My first deployed to production rails app was my blog.
Before that I built a little internal app where I work that managed screen casts that I created to train other people in my company on how to preform certain tasks like adding a new client to PLESK and what not. I think that was about a year ago or so.
My first app was: http://weirdweirdworld.com/
Its basically a viewer for the latest 250 pictures posted on livejournal.com. There were other “viewer” websites for this feed but none of them allowed to save them. Mine does. You can even tag the images del.icio.us style. But the tag cloud got quite out of hand ;) oops.
So a friend of mine asked me if I could do something like that with rails (cause i was talking about rails all the time back then). I said “sure!” and two days later there was weirdweirdworld. Though the usage has dropped the last months, due to my unpublished rewrite and lack of motivation, but t least 2182 pictures got saved and tagged over the years.
My first rails app was built in fall of 2006 and was an Agile Planning Board for a project we were working on.
Basically a one-page app made with Sortable Lists from script.aculo.us so it was really easy to change the board. A demo isn’t live anymore but we still have a description at: http://www.arbdesign.dk/clients/planningboard/
Google Chart API implemented as a DSL for Ruby developers. http://github.com/ParkinT/googchartapi/tree/master
SignalMap! (http://signalmap.com) First exposure to Ruby, Rails, and the Google Maps API! I’m pretty proud of it, but it needs a serious clean up.
A ‘supporting’ (and internal to that particular project) application to serve test data to manual testing (obbiously via web browser) and to automated tests running from a test framework we’ve built. Main reason to build it was to end the pain caused by using all kinds of IDs more than once.
Quite possibly the first ‘locative’ project; all the rage now… Please correct me if I’m wrong. Not rails, but a self-wrought ruby server connected and orchestrated the data between the mobile devices and the maps exhibit. This was when GPRS was cutting edge (pun intended) technology…
My first app was a ticket tracking system, basically using the same models as a blog. Posts became tickets, comments became notes. My company has been using that system for over 2 and a half years now, with some 5000 tickets processed (we are a small 3 person company) and tens of thousands of notes. Since creating it I’ve only made a few small changes, adding in a field for tracking referrals and parts sold. Dead simple and effective to boot :-)
My first Rails app was a simple financial asset tracker named AssetsGraphed: http://assetsgraphed.com/
My first Rails app (and my excuse for learning the language) was Too Many Secrets (http://www.too-many-secrets.com/). At a rate of 5 anonymous confessions per month, it’s the most ironic site name ever.
I’m currently re-writing it from the ground up now that I know more, and also to get rid of the login requirement for posting/voting, because nobody’s going to confess to murder if I have their email address.
Not counting tutorials copied straight from a book, my first project was http://fertilityties.com
It is still up and going strong with lots of traffic. Having now built dozens of sites in rails there are many, many things I’d do differently (many thanks to knowledge gained, others to Rails improvements), but it really is a testament to the whole Rails idea.
The project I used for the purpose of learning Rails was a “Secret Santa” application for my family’s large Christmas reunion last winter.
First app was a Web-based workflow application for tracking product change requests at my day job. Its used internally by hundreds of employees across 4 states (TN, MI, CA, MS) and 3 countries (JAPAN, USA, MEXICO). It took me 8 months of work from concept to deployment. It was a huge undertaking for being my first actual web application outside of blogs, and php apps and it posed many tricky problems that I’d never had to tackle before, like state changes, workflows, and issue tracking and resolution.