We just spent a busy weekend finalising the Calendar of Events for Tasting Australia. Go and have a look, we think it’s rather good, and you’ll be able to plan what you want to do when you go to Adelaide this October. You did say you were going didn’t you?

A bit of a technical aside: We used RubyOnRails, and it’s magnificent AJAX handlers to create the interactive calendar. It’s got all sorts of funky fades and toggles going on.

We just spent a busy weekend finalising the Calendar of Events for Tasting Australia. Go and have a look, we think it’s rather good, and you’ll be able to plan what you want to do when you go to Adelaide this October. You did say you were going didn’t you?

A bit of a technical aside: We used RubyOnRails, and it’s magnificent AJAX handlers to create the interactive calendar. It’s got all sorts of funky fades and toggles going on.

The main advantage of using RubyOnRails to develop this addition to the Tasting Australia website, even though the main section of the site is built on ASP.Net, is that we can spend more time on actually building the application, rather than getting ready to build the application.

What does that mean? Well, in the ASP.Net, C# world, a lot of your time is spent writing code that tells your application how to talk to the database (Data Access Layers, XML Config files and all sorts of ugliness). Once you have that built (and tested), you need to created objects and controls to store that data. Then you need to write Stored Procedures to access the data in the SQL Server. And so on.

All of this is both time consuming and stultifyingly dull. Because you don’t have to do any of this in Rails (well, you do have to create your objects, but that’s easy peasy) you get to spend more time thinking about the application, how it works, and how to make it easier to use.

This means two things: Firstly, we can deliver a better website for the same amount of money, and secondly, we get to have more fun while we’re doing it, because we are continually astounded by Ruby and Rails.

But this entry is supposed to be about Tasting Australia. So visit the Calendar of Events and work out what you want to do.