Xerpi Tech
April 18th, 2007
For those of you interested in the technology behind Xerpi, here is a quick summary:
Xerpi is a Ruby on Rails application! The database is MySQL, of course, and our hosting provider is RailsMachine. We are about to completely re-write the existing application in order to build a better foundation that will allow us to add new functionality fast. Moreover, the existing code (beta release) relies heavily on custom JavaScript and we want to take better advantage of AJAX-oriented JavaScript libraries and the appropriate Rails Helper abstractions to those libraries.
Just a little background... I've done a lot of Enterprise-level distributed development (C/C++ on DCE/Encina, C++ on CORBA, and Java on J2EE, Spring + Hibernate). I was also lucky enough to get early exposure to Python in school. And, I definitely have some opinions with respect to Python vs. Ruby that I won't go into here, yet. Regardless, RoR is simply a dream platform for problem domains like Xerpi. I had become so disillusioned with the "bloat" of Java-oriented development/configuration, especially when compared to the "form is liberating" approach of Python, that RoR and its "convention over configuration" is a very welcome change for me.
To sum up, I am truly excited about the technology and very passionate about the functionality we have lined up to bring to the web. This summer shall be very exciting!