Jun 06
I finally wrapped my head around routes and how to get URLs pointed to the correct actions and controllers.
After that, it literally took 10 minutes to create a view for uploading a file, connect it to the controller, and create another view for displaying the uploaded file.
(Specifically–uploading the location CSV to be parsed and added to the database)
Now to parse!
I’m really beginning to fall in love with Ruby on Rails. It’s been kind of difficult wrapping my head around some of the concepts, but once I do… damn it’s fast.
Once I get the CSV upload mechanism complete, it’s time to create another action for searching and returning a set of locations (in JSON!)
May 31
I have the RoR version of the backend serving data over an encrypted connection. This was the biggest roadblock I had faced so far with RoR
Pretty easy once I figured out the limits of my host.
So far in the Ruby on Rails/PHP-Yii contest, RoR is winning handedly. Parsing text is almost absurdly easy with Ruby.
May 25
So, I thought I had this all figured out. I started playing around with the Yii framework for PHP, and then read a bunch of reviews about how similar it was to Ruby on Rails.
So then I started playing around with Ruby on Rails again. Now with a bit better understanding of how it all works, it… well frankly, it’s fun. Ruby is a joy to program in, and Rails makes certain things really slick and easy once you figure out what the conventions are.
So right now I’m coding my first task (importing the zip code database) in parallel in RoR and PHP/Yii. We’ll see which one wins.
