HomeThis year Season holidays were quite productive. I’ve spent it „mastering the basis” of Ruby on Rails. I have created a simple application for booking work time for SPM Microscope.
You can visit it at: www.spm.brzezinka.eu
Motivation&Idea
I am doing research for my master work using SPM Microscope. There is currently quite a few people doing projects that need this device, so we have to share it. Inpired by the fact, that recently I’ve been told to organize a booking list for this microsope, I decided to make a web application instead of a paper list. And as I am turning from PHP into Ruby on Rails, I found it a perfect opportunity to see the famous rails power in action.
Project
To get familiar with Rails, I have gone through the book Foundation Rails 2 by Eldon Almeda, which I can strongly recommend for people who had something in common with webpages building. I have used three plugins:
- Paperclip for attaching image files,
- Restful-authentication for user authentication,
- Event calendar to show reservations on calendar.
What is my impression on Rails after having this project done? Rails are great! And by this I mean REALLY GREAT. Comparing with PHP, one can develop application much faster and in a more efficiet way. Thing that have consumed my most of the time was… getting plugins work with my application. The true is they are not very good documented for ‚beggingers’. But luckily – ruby code is really intuitive and easy to read, so you can figure out what each function does – it is just a matter of reading through the code. The application is quite simple, no AJAX, no RSS, only simple jQuery for some basic effects. It is perfectly doing what it was expected to 
The conclusion from this appliscation: I would definitely use Ruby on Rails for further projects!
