plasticrain.com

Just a quick entry after noticing a small paragraph in the marketing material from a company selling content management systems to schools:

Our open counsel to any school, working with any developer, would be to ask if they are working in .Net. If not, think long and hard about the problems you might be bringing upon yourself.

What gives this company the right to try and alienate anybody reading their marketing material against using anything other than .net? Unfortunately, schools will read this and believe the using a .net language is the only thing to use – this is far from the truth. Looks like we’ll need to do something about this in our forthcoming literature.

This company also doesn’t seem to have got to grips with the use of CSS for layout as their example sites are built in tables and have multiple validation errors. Also, most of these sites have an annoying and tedious flash intro before the homepage is even visible. For a company charging circa. £4000 per month for a website, this is extremely poor in my opinion.

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Firstly, you might be wondering what Swipe (or Rails) is. Swipe is the aTech Media developed framework which was based on our own MOAT principles (modules, object, action and template) and was written in PHP5.

Advantages of using Swipe

• developed on PHP, therefore easy to deploy sites onto standard hosting environments
• in-depth knowledge of the framework as it was coded by ourselves
• closed source therefore reduced security implications
• easy to encode projects using the ioncube encoder

Disadvantages of using Swipe

• not very flexible
• no third party plugins available, everything needs to be coded manually
• complicated deployment process involving standard subversion updates and checkouts on the remote server
• duplication of code

On the other hand, Ruby on Rails is a highly dynamic and flexible open source framework written in Ruby (rather than PHP) based on MVC principles (model, view, controller) and DRY (dont’ repeat yourself).

Advantage of using Rails

• large number of third party plugins available
• easy deployment recipes using capistrano
• highly flexible
• no code duplication

Disadvantages of using Rails

• when selling to clients, they can be uneasy about using a relatively new framework and perceived lack of Rails developers in the UK
• deployment on a non thread-safe web server such as Mongrel can cause some issues under heavy load unless addressed
• not as much in-depth knowledge of the framework “gotchas”
• open source leads to more possible security implications (although not a problem is addressed)

“Can’t live without” features in Rails which wern’t in Swipe

I’m first to admit that Swipe was a long way behind Rails. Was anyone not expecting this? It had about 4 months of development from a sinhle developer behind it whereas Rails has many years and many developers. The list is just some of the brilliant features of Rails which we couldn’t live without:

• RJS templates for AJAX functionality
• built-it page and fragment caching
• wide variety of useful plugins
• integration with protoype and scriptaculous
• rake tasks
• capistrano
• and many more features

We now use Rails for all our new work and are even moving some PHP sites and projects over to Rails to make our lives easier.

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ActiveReload has recently launched their latest app, Warehouse. It is a web-based subversion browser and its very cool. I’ve spent quite a while today playing with it and exhancing various features such as:

• an option turn a user into a client – the idea behind this is to provide the client with access to a folder within a repo however hiding things which arn’t relevent to them (such as bookmarks and any information about changes in other folders.
• a few atech media logos and information paragraphs
• drop down navigation menu between repos – diff for this here
• various interface changes (colour of top bar is now blue) and title is bigger (see screenshot below)
• removed the default footer as it took up space and wasn’t really needed.
• auto login functionality – diff for this here
• redirect to requested page rather than root – diff for this here

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Update: this has now been replaced by the PlasticRain SVN repo at http://projects.wh.plasticrain.com

RailsBits is a very simple collection of open source Rails resources which we have published within a Trac project as well as made available through SVN.

Take a look at http://trac.atechmedia.com/railsbits

This site contains aTech Media’s open source Rails plugins as well as access to our RoR media files (wallpapers, logos etc…)

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