A new home for Unspace
posted by pete on October 31st, 2007
After a few false starts, Unspace has relocated to 342 Queen West. We’re above LuluLemon, a popular yoga and athletic-wear clothing retail store. We have a whole floor — 2500’ feet including a kitchen, den, fireplace, and a two-level deck. Twice as big as our previous space, if you’re keeping tabs.
At the beginning of the summer, we found a space that we thought might be perfect. It was spread over two floors, and had a walk-out balcony right on Queen Street. However, after finally deciding to move forward, we were informed that the space was not available. Crestfallen, we checked out a number of uninspired boxes in various office buildings in the area.
We almost didn’t bother to come see this space! I came over alone and took about five steps in before calling to get everyone else here. It just felt right, from the outset.
There’s lots of work ahead; painting, cabling, decorating, and the minutiae of getting a new space set up just so. We each have areas we’re most passionate about, whether it’s colours, lamps, the patio deck or the entry way. We’re going to take some photos at each stage and keep you posted on all of the progress.
Unspace on MSDN
posted by hampton on October 25th, 2007
Our old pal Ryan McMinn gave Unspace a nice mention on the Access MSDN blog. I think this might be the first time that Rails has ever been mentioned on an Microsoft blog. The post is about a collaboration that Unspace did with M7 Databases to built a RoR/Access combo to solve an online application system problem for a Canadian music funding agency called FACTOR (which was covered on this blog before). I can say that we are very proud of the work we’ve done with FACTOR and think we’ve built one of the best online application systems in the world. We were able to take very confusing paper applications and make an online system that helps guide you through the process of building your request to the organization.
The only downside to the project is that non-profits don’t tend to be super-flexible with their budgets. Every year they have to come up with a set amount for each internal need. So, it can be a bit hard to try and squeeze in all of the awesome features we want to do within their annual budget while also doing some user support and maintenance on the side. Even with those constraints, I’m happy to say that the final product is something we can truly be proud of.
Here are some of the “fun stats” from that project: 1,407 applications and 223,727 unique pieces of information collected. And its only been running for 7 months. Their application rate has doubled since we launched.
CanRock 4 evar!
Jester gets some recognition
posted by pete on October 19th, 2007
Jester is a JavaScript implementation of Rails’ popular REST protocol, with syntax modeled after ActiveResource. You can use it to read, create, and save your application’s data in your browser-side code.
October 25th: I’ll be giving a presentation, followed by a code workshop on Jester at The Ajax Experience in Boston, MA.
October 29th: I’ve been invited back to present Jester at DemoCamp 15. I think I might be the most prolific DemoCamp presenter.
I have been very excited by the promise of Jester, which I believe could be a disruptive technology. At the time Jester was released by our friend Eric at ThoughtBot in Boston, I was working on a similar library. I called it JMVC, and my goal was to provide Javascript objects which looked and behaved like associated ActiveRecord models. For example, I wanted to be able to query something like:
Company.find(123).employees[2].city.name
I figured that should be possible, and set to work making it so. Not only did Eric beat me out of the gate, his vision was much clearer; what the world needs now is a Javascript implementation of ActiveResource, a part of Rails which allows you to consume a REST-based web service - something very easy to serve up in Rails. While Jester was very different from JMVC, I realized that Eric’s view made the most sense, and so I decided to jump on board and help the project move forward. To this end, I’ve already given one presentation on Jester in July at The Ajax Experience in San Francisco. I got a really bad sunburn on that trip.
Work on Jester has continued through the summer. The library is now properly namespaced, and supports connection to arbitrary remote domains. While a far cry from the JSONRequest object Douglas Crockford has been lobbying for, Jester takes advantage of a security loophole to allow you to call out. This means that mashups of data from different services is possible, without having to call back to the web server to broker these connections.