www.not404.com

As I've previously mentioned, I'm having a blast doing "self-funded R&D".  Playing with all these new technologies is a rewarding, refreshing change from the old Day Job, where I didn't have as much opportunity to play with these toys, figure out what toys I liked, and evangelize the hell out of 'em.

On that note, I've recently been playing with Rails 2.0.2, using RadRails (Aptana Community Edition) on Fedora 8, of course.  Just for fun, I've managed to graft a third-party Ajax Toolkit on top of it. While it's functional, this solution totally needs some work under the hood.  Lots of hard-coded glue stubs just to get something barely operational.  Blecch.  Overall, though, I still kind of like how this little experiment is turning out.

If you're looking for easy alternatives to do something similar, you might want to check out Jester.js as your middleware glue.  It's essentially an ActiveResource proxy in the client's web browser, and is capable of making some of this glue work ridiculously easy.  For this experiment, I decided against using Jester.js, as I wanted to get deep down and dirty, getting as  hands-on with the integration as possible.

Anyway.  Here's a quick attempt to mock something up under my Frankenstein Solution. Yay, I have a TreeView.  While the screenshot can't illustrate this, the TreeView actually does lazy-loading from the FrankensteinServer when you click on the tree nodes for expansion.  OK, so maybe that's not the most impressive thing in the world.  I still had a great deal of fun figuring all this stuff out.  

I'll post more impressive combinations as I prototype them.  For now, though, I'm happy to have a starting point to work from.