Google Maps on Rails

A few weeks ago I wrote a very simple rails app that uses Google Maps API to let runners plot jogging routes, check the distances of the routes, and to save and leave comments about the routes. I had a great time playing with rails and Google's API. Once the main functionality was finished I stopped work on it, so as far as usability goes, I still need to add some touches, but I got around to deploying it yesterday. I call it "Of_Course". You can find it here. By the way, I think I used some javascript calls that are only supported in the latest versions of Firefox. Sorry IE users, I got no love for you... Well, I plan to fix that someday, along with making the whole site prettier and more useable. Also, I am getting random 500 errors when hitting the app. Just refreshing fixes it. This was never a problem with webrick. I blame FCGI. Anyone have any experience with this problem?

Here are some of the links I found particularly useful while building this.

• Google Maps API


• Rails Docs


• Selenium on Rails (Test that javascript too!)


• Selenium IDE (Save time writing those selenium tests)


• Firebug (Direct access to a javascript console and the DOM in firefox)


• Rails on Apache2 and fcgi (Setting up rails and Fcgi is like getting a molasses enema, it takes a long time and frankly it is just gross.)

Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services, and Mechanical Turk.

Tonight we had a really great turnout at the Chicago Ruby users group. Mike Culver from Amazon.com was in town to talk about their webservices: S3, EC2, and Mechanical Turk. The crowd was 35 strong (only 1 other ThoughtWorker besides myself, what gives?). Recruitment pays for the pizza at these meetings and I am happy to say there was a good response from the attendees. After the presentation I was surrounded by a group of 5 - 6 developers asking questions about Ruby at ThoughtWorks and Jobs at TW. But enough about how great it is that TW gets to associate itself with the Local Ruby Community once a month, and how great it is to have free pizza, I'm also really excited about some of the WebServices (WSes) Amazon is offering.