Wanted to write a short blurb on a web application that I recently launched. You can visit it at: http://www.spryee.com. It’s a free and easy-to-use goal & activity tracker.
I created the application in Ruby on Rails 3.2 using the following additional languages/packages/tools:
- CoffeeScript: For all my UI interactions and making AJAX calls
- Twitter Bootstrap: For my UI framework.
- Google Visualization API: For generating charts & graphs
- SASS: For all my style-sheets
- Image Sprites: For all my images
- GIMP: For doing all types of image manipulation
- Jekyll: For creating the blog
- RSpec: For all of my unit-testing
In addition to this, I also used the following gems:
- Authlogic : For user & user-session management. Takes cares of everything having to do with user creation and session management such as, password encryptions, logins, forgot password functionality, cookies, remember-me, login counts, etc.
- GON: Allows you to easily set and send JSON to and from the server to the browser and vice-versa. Very handy!
- simple-form: The best at form generation. Easy to get started and very extendable.
- Rabl: Let’s you define your JSON object using Ruby! How cool is that?
- bootstrap_sass: Bundling support for twitter bootstrap.
- will_paginate: For paginations.
- google_visular: This gem provides a Ruby-based API for interacting with the Google Visualization APIs (which are js-based). It doesn’t support AJAX-based refreshes of the charts but I was able to make it work by making a few modifications. I’ll blog on it another day.
- bloggy: This gem creates a Jekyll blog for your existing Rails app. I had my blog ready to go in just a few hours!
I deployed the web-app on Heroku because 1) it takes away virtually all of pain that’s associated with deployment and because 2) it’s completely free until you’ve got enough users to where an upgrade becomes necessary.
Hope this helps someone who might be getting started with Ruby on Rails!
