http://www.tobinharris.com/blog – My blog
http://www.tobinharris.com – my home page
I’m an independent software developer based in Leeds, UK. I’m new to Ruby and Rails in early 2005, but oh yes, I’m loving it 8-)
I’ve never done so much with so little code. Ruby and Rails pleasantly surprises me every week, and I’m trying to share these moments on my nerd blog .
I’ve started my first commercial project in Rails and it’s going great (he says, touching the laminate wood desk).
The application is a commercial business application to be used in assessing and coaching employees. We’re launching with 3 languages – English, Danish, and Dutch (thanks to iconv and My Sql UTF8 support!).
To help get these language versions off the ground I’ve been working on some features that allow the client to control language content, leaving me to focus on coding. The idea is that they can update and review language resources on the fly, through an easy interface – with a sprinkling of AJAX to save on round-tripping ;-) The project is almost completed now, and the staff have complete editorial control of all language versions through the web interface.
The app is also spitting out PDF reports using the Ruby FPDF library . I’ve written some functions to allow for basic HTML formatting in the PDF docs – which makes report templating possible. I’m impressed with the speed so far; I can query the database, spit out 12×5 page multilingual reports with images, zip em up with ruby-zip in about 20 seconds. Nee bad for starters!…
Other than Ruby + Rails I’m also working on some challenging projects using the Microsoft .NET framework. Amongst others these include:
- A suite of CASE tool plugins for Wells Fargo bank. These assist various activities such as GUI prototyping, test case generation, and requirements report generation.
- A web data mining application for a UK based web intelligence company. This is a high-speed, multi-threaded app that against an optimised SQL Server database. It also uses the NHibernate object/relational mapper for the administration side of things.