Monday, September 12, 2005

RailsPlayground.com Free Ruby On Rails Hosting

I was chatting with Josh the other day about our prototyping process at work, lamenting that forms and tables are more trouble than they're worth to prototype in photoshop and that I was thinking of just jumping straight to HTML on the next project*. He said, why stop there, let's just prototype in ruby on rails and build actual working forms for people to play with. This makes a lot of sense, to acknowledge that the first version is going to be a throwaway anyway, and just build something that is guaranteed to be tossed out (since the production version will be on webwork).

I've got a side project coming up, a book trade that's run prior to a conference in March, but I've already coded it before (in ColdFusion of all improbable languages), so I'm not all that excited about building it again. I'm more interested in front-end stuff, recoding the back-end of something in another language doesn't sound that thrilling. Unless it was to learn a whole new environment that could have practical work application. So I've signed up for my free account. Now I need to get a local dev environment setup on my laptop. Josh…

*I did jump straight to HTML on the project I'm working on now, but I'm finding that once the foundation is set I have to pull a screenshot into photoshop to adjust the colors and decorations (and it still has a little ways to go). But it does save a whole lot of time.

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