old-blog.tonyconfrey.net

I’m doing a bunch of reading in various areas to get caught up to the state of the art for a project I’m now involved with. We’re building an RIA on RAILS to integrate with Facebook and trade in Flash animations. Its taking up pretty much all my available time but I’m gonna try to put a few short blog entries together to capture where I am on a few of the steeply upward sloping learning curves.

RIAs on RAILS

I’m reading the book Ajax on Rails. Its pretty cool stuff. You write code almost entirely in Ruby on the back end with Javascript created on the fly to pass to the client. The Scriptalicious and Prototype Javascript libraries are totally integrated into the RAILS framework and so most of the UI logic is implemented fully in Ruby. The whole stack makes putting together RIA’s very simple (at least in theory). On the back end the integrated stack of MVC components seems to make implementation very efficient.

I’m drowning a bit in all the gory details and haven’t been able to devote much time to Ruby so I have few anchor points as I read and am probably missing a lot at this point. I’m hoping the whole thing degrades gracefully as you move outside its areas of strength. It seems like very rich soil in which to plant an application and at this point I think its the right choice for my purposes.

I also did a little investigation in to the Amazon Associates program. Signing up was trivial. There are a few ways you can go with them. The spectrum ranges from an engine which can generate adds for you off site totally under their control, to a set of screens which generate javascript to embed in your site to display adds for specific products. I don’t know what information they base their recommendations on. They’re going to give me 4% of sales generated thru my links for the first 7 sales and then up it to 6%. So please feel free to click thru and buy the Ajax on Rails book, it’l help me experiment with their back end reporting mechanism!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 3:53 pm and is filed under business model, technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.