Folks, We''ve launched www.RedBlueus.org, a one-to-one dialogging application built in Rails that matches users from opposite ends of the political spectrum to talk about divisive issues. The system is designed to help users have productive dialogues focused on conversation rather than debate. I was the chief (and pretty much only) engineer. Major features: 1) A simple wiki-like content management system (the client manages all pages on the site), 2) XHTML compliance, 3) Email reminders, 4) A DHTML (via prototype) "virtual facilitator" that walks users through a set of questions designed to help create productive (rather than trollish, knee-jerk) responses, 5) An Apache 2.2 / mongrel / postgresql 8.1 backend, 6) A rich admin system, 7) A performance tweaked rights/roles system inspired by the one in Rails Recipes, 8) Role-based HTML filtering, 9) A guided dialogue process that essential walks participants through a queue-based "workflow", starting with a set of opening questions, a back-and-forth phase and finally a survey about the dialogue and "closing comments." This was sort of "build to suit" - the scope wasn''t as fleshed out as it should''ve been at the start of the project. I found Rails to be an excellent choice in this case because the separation of concerns really helped me make pretty big changes without a lot of effort. Observations: * It felt like I had a very high probability of my first effort at writing code working perfectly - I chalk it up to the orthogonal nature of the changes Rails and MVC affords. Orthogonal focus begets quality. * Centralizing logic in models and a liberal use of partials was a godsend as this project progressed and changes came down the pike. * We don''t treat the database as a souped-up flatfile storage engine - we''re using triggers, foreign keys, functions and "advanced" postgres features to keep the data clean and tidy. The default rails assumptions about your database basically being stupid makes this a bit more difficult to manage (especially when it comes to testing and migrations), but not insurmountable. This was our first major Rails project. So far, we are very happy with the results in terms of deployment options, development time and quality of the code and framework. Feel free to ding me here if you''ve got questions. I''ll throw up a link to the press release when we''ve posted it to our main site. Thanks! -DJCP Dan Collis-Puro Software Engineer http://www.endpoint.com -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---