Rails Video Application

EDIT: Demo up and running, the URL is http://videoapp.railsonedge.com/

Earlier this semester, I decided I wanted to keep working on my Video Application(see the Flash Video Tutorial). So when my databases teacher let us decide what our semester project would be, I signed up to do a YouTube-like site.

Since the tutorial, I've added a lot of things: User Authentication(authlogic), Video Thumbnails(using ffmpeg), Pagination(will_paginate), Tags/Tag Cloud(acts_as_taggable_on_steroids), and I wrote up some quick code to take care of user replies. I also added a little bit of CSS to the application so it didn't look so plain. It looks a lot better, but I'm still working on some of it. You can checkout the code for it on GitHub(http://github.com/balgarath/video-app/tree/master). The code from the previous tutorial is in the 'Tutorial' branch.

Anyway, I will have a demo of the application up sometime the next couple days. I'll get the URL posted here. Feel free to fork the repo and play around with the app.

Yehuda Katz talks about Rails 3.0

Just got through watching Yehuda Katz's talk about Rails 3.0 he gave at MountainWest RubyConf 2009. Lots of good stuff about where Rails is headed, as well as the ORM-abstraction that Yehuda is working on, ActionORM. ActionORM is a layer built to make any ORM look just like it is ActiveRecord, to Rails. Yehuda also talks a little bit about how he is working to change rails so that it will be easier to do things such as changing out ORMs, or even something like replacing ActionController with your own Controller code.

Towards the end he talks about how some people have said that by Merb merging with Rails, there will be less competition, and there will be less competition. Yehuda points out that by making rails modular, competition will be more between different parts of the framework(ActiveRecord vs. Datamapper). I agree with him and think that this will be a huge benefit to the community as a whole. Heres the video:

This video brought to you by ConFreaks. Lots of great videos at the website from many other Ruby-related conferences.