In the need of a simple application that could let me easily transfer text snippets or links from my laptop to my work machine, I felt I should write my own application to do it. Even after looking at all the other great services that would more than do what I need, I still felt the urge to write my own implementation.
Normally, I would fire up TextMate and get to crackin’ at some PHP files, but for such a simple application, I had a different approach… Why don’t I use this as a chance to learn Ruby on Rails! It has been something i’ve been meaning to do for a few years now, but have never found the perfect application to learn from.
After getting Rails setup on both my local machine and my Slice, as well as setting up Passenger on my Slice so I’d be ready to deploy my application, I got to work. I read through some basic Rails tutorials about basic application setup, scaffolding, etc. I also read about doing thing the “Rails way”. I am quite comfortable doing anything in an object-oriented mindset, in fact, that’s what I prefer. Unfortunately I have never more than stepped foot into the world of MVC. Luckily it didn’t take too long for me to catch on.
After this experience, I must say that I have drank the kool aid, and I am lovin’ me some Rails. Having a great ORM at my disposal, the amount of baked in methods and helpers that Rails has, and not to mention the extremely read-friendly Ruby code, this is great! Don’t forget all the community plugins that make things like user-authentication a breeze!
Of course this is still a work-in-progress, and I’m not sure if I will ever put it up on its own domain, but I definitely use it frequently, and now eagerly await the next project to tackle with Rails.
Oh! Of course! The URL is: clip.rails.ripeworks.com if you didn’t click the above image in the post.
