The Wonsys Blog

Last week, we officially closed the beta for a client project we’ve been working on for the past 5 months.
The project is called Episode39: it’s a website for TV shows lovers. Unfortunately, it’s in Italian only, so most of you won’t be able to use it.

We were in charge of the development of the platform — the design was given to us and we only had to make a few UX changes –, which, of course, is built on top of our beloved Ruby on Rails.
There’s a bit of MySQL trickery here and there — especially for shows matching between users and full-text search –, but most of it is pure Ruby.

With every new project we learn something new, and this one was not different: we had a lot of custom SQL queries, joins, and queries that couldn’t be trimmed down using eager loading, still, we couldn’t allow for slow pages with tens of queries.
Luckily enough, there’s a lot you can do to improve your apps with clever usage of Ruby/Rails and MySQL.
Remember, ActiveRecord is nice and good for most situations, but at times you must get your hands dirty and work directly on the DB if you want your site to perform properly.

Make sure you give Episode39 a spin if you can understand Italian and let us know what you think about it.

Stay tuned for a couple more announcements during the next few days!

This post was written by Michele 8 months, 2 weeks ago on November 11th, 2007 lunch time.
Tags: clients, italian, Rails.