evilzenscientist :: thoughts » 2005 » October

Ruby On Rails October 2, 2005

Posted by evilzenscientist in : 'Web 2.0', evilzenscientist , add a comment

I was talking to a friend in Barcelona about application development (note - I’m not a hacker; “I don’t write code” TM).

He mentioned that Ruby on Rails was getting a few people inside Novell excited.

Since then I’ve stumbled across literally dozens of brand new, hot, useful web apps that are based on Ruby on Rails. All stemming from a few core projects from 37Signals.

BackPack

Posted by evilzenscientist in : blogging, evilzenscientist , 1 comment so far

I blogged a few days ago about Backpack - and I’ve now been using it for about a week.

I’m still pretty impressed by the look, feel and general behaviour of the application; Backpack really reminds me of Lotus Organiser from about ten years ago. Except it’s extensible, in the web, always available and sharable.

One new feature that’s had some attention in the blogosphere (Scoble et al) is the Writeboards. Think of it as an always on Word or Powerpoint document that’s many-to-one sharable. And Editable. With track changes and edits.

This is a way cool feature.

I’m still looking at the security of all this. I implicitly (foolishly?) trust people like Google for my mail; I also accept that my corporate data is backed up somewhere and belongs to my employer. It’s just a little larger leap of faith for me to trust a new player in this space. What will they do with my data? Should I ever store anything more confidential than a to-do list online?