Niko by Nik Korablin

It has been a wild six months. I remember when Ofo first came to me with the idea. It was a great idea and there was definitely a space for it in today’s online landscape. At the time, I had never took on a project so large and challenging. I did not even know anything about Ruby on Rails. All my previous experience had been in PHP and ASP.NET. After many long nights and cans of Mountain Dew, the website is finally live and ready for consumption. Check it out or read more about the process after the jump.

Why Rails?

The Ruby on Rails framework was something I was always interested in. I was growing tired of working with PHP and wanted to try something new and fresh and a more MVC. At the start of the project, my MVC experience really stemmed from ASP.NET projects for school and even those were rudimentary and not purely MVC either. Rails introduced me to a mode of web development that made everything more simple and more clear.

With Rails, many assumptions are already made for you. In some ways, this can be limiting, but for me it was liberating. I did not have to worry about low level implementation that is most often pretty boilerplate across all web applications. Instead I could focus on the unique problems of Whose Your Landlord and develop something that just works.

Plus, I Got to Write in Ruby

I did have experience with Ruby beforehand, so syntax was not that much of a hurdle. I always enjoyed programming in dynamically-typed languages and so writing Ruby was fun and refactoring my code was always rewarding. It is going to be difficult to go back to working with Java and JSP once I start working at Vanguard.

RESTful Routing Puts Me at Rest

There were a few challenges grasping the concept of routing in Rails. Learning how to handle nested resources was the biggest issue, namely handling the fact that a housing review is owned by a housing which is owned by a college and keeping all that information in the URL, while keeping it nice looking. I may have broke some rules by having a two level deep route, but I thought it was important to maintain the college in the url to avoid confusion. If you know of a better way, I’m all ears.

In The End

There were a lot more challenges I had to deal with when developing this site, many of which I’ll probably go over in detail here. I just wanted to write a quick reflection on the site right after I launched, but stay tuned for posts detailing more specific areas of the site with plenty of code examples and what not.

October 24, 2012 Tags: programming, rails, ruby, whose your landlord

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