Well, I have another little fun web app up and running. Check it out at GraffitiWok.com. Aside from the chance to advertise a site from which I don’t expect to ever profit, I thought I’d share a bit about developing it, with this article as an intro and then some additional discussion in later articles.

The Idea

The concept is that off post-it type notes on a board of no particular size limit. Actually, the real concept was a web site that acted as a wall on which people could draw, but alas. Features I’ve considered and may not get around to are the ability to add pictures and videos to this “wall” or “board” as I’ve ended up calling it in the code. Actually, I think it turned out kind of neat. It’s just that it doesn’t actually meet any need that I can think of. Oh, well, it was fun.

The Technology

GraffitiWok introduced me to several technologies: Merb, a Ruby web framework soon to be integrated with Rails, DataMapper, a Ruby ORM, similar in theory to ActiveRecord, although rather different in practice, jquery, a javascript library, and the version control software git. For those who follow this blog, you’ll figure out that this project has been a long time in process, about a year with seeds before then, as Wistle uses Merb and DataMapper; GraffitiWok actually proceeded Wistle.

Anyway.

It was a fun way to learn about these technologies and that’s what the follow up articles will be about.

Developed for Firefox

Yes, it works in IE. It might even work in Safari and Opera (I haven’t tried), but I really developed this to work in Firefox. Why? Because I could. After all, it was primarily for fun, not money, and I didn’t feel like worrying about browser incompabilities. Although, thanks to jquery, those are probably minimal. Still, it was really nice not spending a great deal of time jumping between browsers–especially since IE became very slow with it at several points.