Ruby on Rails, eXeem and mental wanderings

Posted on January 21, 2005 No Comments

Tech - Came across a link today about Ruby on Rails. Now, I’m usually the first guy to scoff at anything that touts itself as a technical solution towards making my development life better, but… this one really intrigues me. I’ve known about Ruby for a while, but never really saw where I ‘needed’ to go play with it. However, this Ruby on Rails stuff looks pretty slick. I’m trying to think of a simple little web application (that I could actually use) to cobble together and play with it a bit.

And yes, I’ve been bitten enough times by tools (remember a decade ago when 4GL’s were going to save the world? I was there in the midst of it) that will “speed up development, cut costs, make re-use easier, generate the code for you, use business objects” blah blah blah. I like to think I’m pretty jaded. But yeah… huh… I’m intrigued.

Speaking of jaded, I see eXeem is in open beta. If I’m reading the site right, it appears to be ad-supported. *sigh* I dunno… I like the concept of the tool but I dunno about the adware thing.

Calm day at work, but busy enough as usual. The guy I worked with last week to get our stuff running on a PDA and Tablet had his pitch today and I guess it went pretty well. People seem happy. That means I need to start thinking a bit harder about how to bundle all this up into one easily installable chunk. Yikes! The initial install don’t scare me too much, but pondering on how to handle updates as time goes on does cause some hives. However, the core of this all is our ability to sync databases between our servers and their (sometimes offline) databases - perhaps I can concoct a scheme of pushing all data and CODE down to the remotes in the db and then extract/update client-side. Ever feel like you’re re-inventing the wheel? The seems to sum up the tech industry pretty well…

Tags: eXeem, pocketPC, ruby-on-rails