Over the past week, I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on a project for school. It was supposed to be an inventory / rental / customer management system for a video store, complete with changeable rental policies, bonus policies, rental limits, and the like. Quite a large project, especially for one towards the end of the quarter. Our group ended up with a pretty good implementation, which very largely met all of the requirements. A few groups have presented their project already, and most of them seem pretty buggy and feature incomplete. I’m proud of our work, even though it’s not great.

Now, what I really think helped us was our use of Ruby on Rails, which is an amazing web application development environment. Considering I didn’t know any ruby on Wednesday morning (6 days ago) and went ahead to write a fairly complex web application by Monday at midnight-ish. All I’ve got to say is: Ruby on Rails rocks! I’ve been avoiding writing web apps, and working with databases because of all the pain that comes along with them, but Rails made it pretty darn painless. I’d recommend it.