I just gave this presentation for BarCamp on a relative comparison between migrating a small application from WebObjects to Ruby on Rails.

I wrote the WO version years ago; since it served my needs, I never added features.

While it was tempting to add new features (especially some small AJAX stuff), I decided to implement the old system feature-for-feature so I could get a better feel for how to migrate such an app. My only concession to railsisms was to rename some of the tables and columns to fit Rails naming conventions.

Now that I’ve documented everything, I’m going to add some cool new features.

On a completely different note, when the voting came out for the Hugo Awards, I was part of a 3-way tie for 13th place on the Campbell Award nominations ballot. Given that 113 people were nominated, I think that’s pretty freakin’ good.

And that, my friends, is one of the reasons why I wrote the app in the first place.

Updated to add: Bill Humphries pointed out that I really should have returned a class rather than a color in the following line:

when tsent < tnow - 3.years : "FF0000"

Yes, true, however, I did the original app before I did the stylesheet thing and, as I said, I was re-implementing feature-for-feature. In the app itself, I do let the user select colors for certain categories (I haven’t yet redesigned to allow user-by-user colors, though).