Life & Research Notes

I started a new promise service Rails app a few days ago, and I’m discovering all these wonderful new features in Rails 1.1, as well as some features I didn’t properly take advantage of in the previous version.

• There are many, many plugins, and some of them are awesome. I threw authentication together really fast with Rick Olson’s acts_as_authenticated. It feels easy and lightweight, and uses generators to create a nice starter scaffold. I think I’ll also use techno acts_as_attachment to handle user pictures.
• I looked at the Engine plugin system, and specifically LoginEngine, but the whole Engine approach just feels too heavy and fixed for my needs.
• Migrations are great. In addition to providing a simple schema/data versioning system, it is also just nice to take care of most of the database work without every touching sql.
• People will sign promises to make them active, as well as to bear witness. I’m planning to use polymorphic associations to leave room for other types of models (like contracts) to be signable later. Might even pull out the code into an acts_as_signable plugin…
• Since people can sign these signable items in different capacities (signee, witness, objector to start), this is a good place to also use the activerecord :through association.

Those are the notes for today. I’m sure I’ll have more as development of this thing progresses.

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