Upgrading to rails3 - request_routing plugin issue

We are working on upgrade some application from rails 2.3.4 to rails 3.0.4 and we want to share with you some thoughts and solutions.

The first solution we want to show you is particulary useful if you are working on app you didn't create or you did it years ago and you have no idea why ;)

If you see error similar to that when you are running your app:

.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p334/gems/actionpack-3.0.4/lib/action_dispatch/routing/route_set.rb:298:in `initialize': wrong number of arguments (7 for 2) (ArgumentError)

that means your app has installed request_routing plugin. Is there version for rails3? Probably not, but solution is simple! You don't need this plugin in rails3 so you can just remove it to solve this problem.

Simple Ads Server - Reactivation

We had kick off meeting for our second educational open source project on monday. It is called Simple Ads Server and it is secound try to run it. The first impression is awesome. Guys are really great.

There is still place for one young developer who wants learn rails3 and get some real experience in industry.

You can follow project on:

• github
• pivotal tracker
• twitter

Simple News Aggregation is ready

We are full of proud because we can announce that our open source project called Simple News Agreggation was finished. Big thanks for young polish developer involved in project - Jakub Gorzelak. Well done, Jakub.

You can find this project on github https://github.com/200/Simple-News-Aggregation

It is not deployed anywhere because it was just a learning project.

We are preparing to start new open source learning project now. More details soon.

Field report

A few words about our progress.

Simple News Aggregation looks so great. The full admin panel and feeds backend is ready. Now we are working on users actions. You can see current progress on github.

We also refreshed layout for our facebook project. You can see it here. It looks quite nice so people start like it. We have to implement social features and start promotion in chrismas time.

New project on Facebook

Hi

We have been starting our expansion on Facebook. We have a lot ideas about facebook apps and we decide to concentrate our forces on this market.

Our first facebook app is simple page when user can find links to polish charity sites and visit them to give them a support. We treat this app as boot camp and great occasion to do something good.

The first version in launched. You can visit it here. 

There is a lot to do in this application. Our plans for that you can see on pivotal tracker - the best agile project management tool: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/155361

Field report

Time to break silence on the blog. Holidays are over and new blog post should be created.
The first thing we want share with you is field report form our open source projects: Simple News Aggregation and Simple Ads Server.

The last of both is frozen now. The reason is lack of our time and mistakes in project managments. The project will be rerun after Simple News Aggregation launch. Unfortunetlly we are not ready to manage two open source project at the same time. Good lesson for us.

The Simple News Aggregation grows fast and we have been finishing preproduction now. We had created basic mockups in Pencil (Firefox extension for mockups creation) based on project overview document. Than we created static application with our interface to check how it works and users feelings. We are working on make interface more nice and modern now. After that we start production: rails3 application with tests in cucumber and rspec. In this place we have to say thank you and respect to Jakub Gorzelak - free software developer involved in this project. Good work, Kuba!

Thanks for your attention. Feel free to leave your opinion in comments.

Workflow

We are starting two open source projects now. One of our main goals is check how our workflow works in practice. We have some experience in game dev industry and we want to move some conclusions to web dev. The most important thing are: user experience is king and preproduction is queen. We think code is the last thing you should do. Make sure client know what he wants, you know what he wants,  it works and user will enjoy it.

1. Idea - the start point. You have an another great idea for successful startup. You can't waste any minute. You have to start coding (or find someone else to do that) as soon as possible to conquer the internet and make you rich. Wrong way! Now you should make sure your idea is really work worthing. After that you should start preproduction. It helps you crystallize what your really want and safe a lot of your money and developers work.
2. Project overview - the most important part of preproduction process. Short document that informs all concerned people what the project is about. It should be rather short and describe only basic features. Many greate ideas will born in your head what else your app should do but you should drop it and concentrate on the core. It shouldn't be updated during next steps for two reasones: all MUST HAVE features all already described here and noone will read it during production. 
3. Paper mockups - get piece of paper and draw mockups how which pages should looks like, what they should contain. Don't think about details - next step is for that. Why we start with user interface? Well, the answer is quite trivial - apps are for users so the main goal for us is make user happy when he is using our application. If you start with features implementation you can someday wake up with thousands line of code that do amazing things but there will be no way to create user friendly interface for that. Think about it!
4. Mockups - use some design tool and create digital mockups for all views in your application. Remember about two variants of each action at least: when there is content to display and when where is not / when action is finished with success and when is not.
5. HTML - now you should create simple static application to test how your interface works and looks like. Use html, css and javascript and feel free to by inspired by the best guys in industry (visit http://dribbble.com/ or similar websites). Focus on the most important parts of UI. When your help people to find restaurant focus on search process and restaurant overview. Things like which font we should us in footer can wait.
6. Implementation (tests first) - now you can write some code. Take ticket, create own branch in repo for it and start thinking about you really know what they want you to do. If not  - ask. If you have your own idea how it can be done better - discuss. And now you can write some cucumber scenarios and start coding. When it's done and all cucumber scenarios and rspecs are green then show someone your code to revision. After that you can merge your branch with master and deploy. Enjoy!

Feel free to leave your feedback. We are exciting your experience.