Matt King's Blog!

Almost a year after launch, I’ve finally started developing version 2.0 of Unthirsty, a happy hour finder using Google Maps.

Since launching Unthirsty, I haven’t done much in way of improving it. I think of it as a way to let it sit and mature, which it has wonderfully. Both Jason Glaspey (my partner in crime) and I have discovered a few things that could be improved, both from regular use and from user feedback. But we’ve also come up with a laundry list of new features we want to add. Overall, the most exciting thing about the new and improved Unthirsty will be developing it with Ruby on Rails.

The most exciting thing about the new and improved Unthirsty will be developing it with Ruby on Rails, which I’ve come to know and love in the past 6 months while working on a few projects both freelance clients and my new employer, Instrument Marketing. Finally taking the dive and learning Ruby has been great, and working in the Rails framework has been a great experience. Creating Unthirsty 2.0 in Rails is going to make the daunting list of new features much easier to tackle. If I continued using PHP I would probably never get it done.

A few things that Ruby and Rails will dramatically help with will be:

Keeping track of data relationships

After creating the class relationship map, I counted at least 16 different relationships between entities in the application. Keeping track of all relationships and validations in PHP would have been a nightmare.

Geocoding

I’ve discovered a Ruby gem Graticule, that works with pretty much all the major geocoding services, to geocode addresses into coordinates. It also has methods to calculate distance, and even a SQL query generator that will find locations within a radius of a given point. Although Unthirsty has all this functionality currently, having this completely abstracted in another library is going to make life so much easier.

AJAX Interface to data

I’ve gained a lot more Javascript experience since I initially worked on Unthirsty, including tons of time into working with Prototype. With Rails Prototype helpers, grabbing data and plotting it on the map from the Unthirsty database will be a lot simpler. Outputting data will be a snap since ActiveRecord objects can be converted to JSON with one method. Currently Unthirsty data comes out and is processed by Javascript in a really convoluted way that is hard to maintain.

There will be a ton of exciting new features and improvements coming with this new version of Unthirsty, but we do know that we’re doing something right already. The trick is to keep that rhythm going. I think we’ll be able to.