Track your running miles using JRuby, Ruby-on-Rails, GlassFish, NetBeans, MySQL, and YUI Charts


This blog introduces a new application that will provide basic tracking of your running distance and generate charts to monitor progress. There are numerous similar applications that are already available/hosted and this is a very basic application. What's different about this ?

The first version of this application is built using JRuby, Ruby-on-Rails, GlassFish Gem, MySQL, and NetBeans IDE. This combination of technologies is a high quality Rails stack that is used in production deploymnet at various places. Still nothing different ?

A similar version of this application will be built using a variety of Web frameworks such as Java EEGrails, Wicket, Spring and Struts2 (in no particular order). The goal is to provide a similar application, slightly bigger than "Hello World," built using different frameworks and deploy on GlassFish. Each framework will then be evaluated based upon the criteria ranging from the basic principles of framework, ease-of-use in design/development/testing/debugging/production of this web app, database interaction, tools support, ability to add 3rd party libraries, browser compatibility and other points. 

An important point to note is that this is not an exhaustive evaluation of different Web frameworks and the scope is limited only to this application.

A complete list of frameworks planned is available here. The criteria used to evaluate each framework is described here. Your feedback in terms of Web frameworks and evaluation criteria is highly appreciated.  Please share your feedback on the users list.

Now the first version of application. The complete instructions to check out and run the Rails version of this application are available here.

Here are some charts generated using the application:



and



YUI is used for all the charting capabilities.

And here is a short video that explains how the application work:



If you are a runner, check out the application and use it for tracking your miles. A sample runlog is available in "test/fixtures/runlogs.yml" and races in "test/fixtures/races.yml".

If you know Rails, please provide feedback if the application is DRY and using the right set of helpers.

If you'd like the existing list of web frameworks to be pruned or include another one to the list, let us know.

Share you feedback at users@runner.kenai.com.

Technorati: jruby rubyonrails glassfish netbeans mysql yahoo yui chart running miles framework