On the heels of my presentation at LFNW09 on Cloud-based web development, I was asked what my qualifications were to present on the topic.
Personally, I think education is the best teacher, but sometimes you need a piece of paper to prove your skills. So, in addition to my 14 years of web development experience, two and a half years working on Ruby on Rails, and two years on BungeeConnect, I do have some certificates to back it up.
I gave a talk at LFNW '09; I started with the question "can you create a web application, development to deployment, all in the browser?" I already knew the answer; yes, because of my experience with Bungee Labs' BungeeConnect project, and Heroku's HerokuGarden project.
A variety of solutions exist for creating web content in your browser, but most of them are exceptionally limited, or niche products. These include Yahoo Pipes, Google's Gadget Editor, and AppPad. Unfortunately, none of them provide an complete, robust development environment, leaving... wait for it... BungeeConnect and HerokuGarden. :-)
What the heck is BungeeConnect?
Bungee Connect, from Bungee Labs, is Object-Oriented Programming for the web. No HTML/JS/CSS required. Familiarity design patterns, on the other hand, is. But don't worry too much about it - there's a complete learning curriculum ( videos, sample code, even tests!) to get you up to speed.
The best way I know to demonstrate a programming language, though, is to dig in. So, here's 19-minute video showing the complete process of developing and deploying an app, from 0 to a published app.
In a fit of asexual reproduction, Heroku recently split their solution in two: heroku.com is now a paid service for hosting Ruby on Rails in the cloud; herokugarden.com continues to provide the service of my primary interest - web based development of live-deployed Ruby on Rails application. This is straight-up Ruby on Rails, no monkey business. You need to either know or be learning RoR, or this system will be useless to you. Thankfully, RoR has a robust community, so tools, tutorials and samples are never far away.
Again, I think its better to show than to talk, so here's the video: building an RoR app on HerokuGarden, in 12 minutes!
Small Note: Please don't judge my coding abilities in either environment, as a result of the samples. I do produce solid, well documented, tested code on a regular basis. Just not in the under-20-minutes category ;-)
Thanks to Brad at BungeeLabs for some visuals that help explain the BungeeConnect environment, and everyone who attended my presentation at LFNW. See you next year!
A Basecamp account. To use SSL and manage Time Entries, you need at least a Plus Account.
Just as a reminder, this code is released completely free to the BungeeConnect community; feel free to use and abuse it to your hearts content.
CampHappier Project
I'm also proud to announce that this code is also the first Release Candidate from the CampHappier Project: a group of code components arranged around the concept of making 37Signals' Basecamp Project Management app more feature rich via the API. Chime in on the Wiki or via GetSatisfaction.
Drop me a comment and let me know how you're using the code.
