I know, I know, I said before that I was going to keep updating everyone about the progress of my issue tracking revamping. And I will. In fact, if you read the last update your pretty much up-to-date because I have been busy with PAID work since then.
However, not only paid work is starting to eat into my time. I have found a catalyst to get me moving on Lootly! A reader of this blog, Carlos, offered to help me get running with Lootly! If you don’t know what Lootly is, I suggest you go here and read a little of the background info on it.
I have actually already written Lootly! Sort of. It started out in CF5 and tied into an older version of Amazon Web Services. I then upgraded the xml processing with CF6 came out but didn’t really do any significant work on it beyond that. For instance, one thing I wanted to do, but never got around to, was refactoring to take advantage of CFCs.
It was hosted on our companies only public facing server. However, some schmo installed a poorly written ASP script on the same server, then we were hit by a hacker, and all personal efforts had to come off the machine since we also host some customer stuff there. That sucked mainly because it was the only way I could afford (free!) CF hosting.
So, where does that leave me? Well I have debated back and forth (with myself) about using something other than CF for Lootly! simply because I can’t afford a CF host that would support my eventual needs. Actually, I just afford any CF host. I pay about $10/month for my current PHP host and that is about all I can justify to my wife. My personal debate focused primarilly around Ruby and PHP. Both pretty cool and feature rich languages that can fill the bill. The biggest strike against Ruby is the same as CF - finding a host that I can afford. Everyone offers PHP hosting; but not everyone has Ruby.
However, a big plus in favor of Ruby is Rails. I think it is an incredibly slick looking framework. I have dug into a bit and it was amazing how quickly I was able to build a simple application. It was even faster than CF - and CF is about as fast as you can get really. Ruby also has some really cool shortcuts for quickly creating mutators (getters/setters).
class Song
attr_reader :name, :artist, :duration
end
This creates getters on the Song class for the name, artist and duration fields.
Example thanks to Philip Jacob.
Recent development in PHP land such as the release of mach-ii for PHP and CAKE (a Rails like framework) make PHP very intriguing as well. Plus, once again there is that cost factor. However, I have decided to start out with Ruby. I want to learn the language anyway and this seems like a great opportunity to do so. Who knows, maybe I’m crazy.