Juvely, Mark II

Luca on June 4th, 2008

Yay, at last exams are over, so now I can begin work on Juvely again! Well, not entirely true, as Im off to do some voluntary work for a week, but when I return its full speed ahead! Last week James and I had a chat and decided the best way for us to work would be implement the code and design seperately, until we are definate on what features we want, so yesterday I started work…

Originally we decided to create Juvely using the CakePHP framework because James didn’t know Rails much and we both planned to do the programming, in the end though it was me stuck doing it, and I grew to like CakePHP quite well. It is a nice framework, and clearly a lot of hard work has gone into it, but there are two things I don’t really like about it: PHP is an ugly language, and for some reason on our server is sssllloowww… Keepsy (written in Ruby on Rails) performs a lot more processing and intensive database queries than Juvely but seems a lot faster. Its not as if I have got it setup wrongly, they are both running as FastCGI applications under Lighttpd - you don’t get faster than that!

So anyway, yesterday I begin Juvely Mark II, in Rails. Just to give you an example of how I feel PHP is ugly, here are two identical statements in CakePHP then Rails. It is used to link the Tickets and TicketMessages models.

At the moment there is nothing really to show as I have only worked on it for about 5 hours, but I hope to add a much more Web 2.0 interface (I recently came across MoveMe, it has a really nice design but doesn’t look cheesy), and maybe even Google Gears integeration for offline usage.

Anyway, watch this space! For now here is a screenshot of what it looks like at the moment (not good…):

(P.S. This is also my first time posting with Wordpress 3, it looks very nice although it took ages for me to figure out how to attach an image as the form the ‘Insert To Post’ link is on doesn’t render correctly on Opera…)

Categories: Announcements, CakePHP, Juvely, Misc, Rails