Great write-up of your experience! It's particularly interesting that you moved away from Java/GWT to RoR. Did you find handrolling your own javascript (+ frameworks) to be just as productive as the Java/GWT approach? (My RoR app has most of the funky javascript GUI after authorization, so it's not indexable anyway.)
Some other questions:
- When do you plan on releasing your git bundle for TextMate? :)
- Has there been any gotchas when using Joyent's Sun platform?
No gotcha's with Joyent so far. I've been using Solaris for a couple years so Matt leaves the sys admin stuff to me. We also use webmin which makes things much much easier.
The git bundle is pretty basic (add, commit, pull, and push) if you are interested in it shoot me an email and I will send it to you.
Hey - I'll let my co-founder dan talk to you about git + joyent.
As for javascript - javascript is actually a decent language IMHO, the debugging just SUCKS. And the libraries are quite young.
I hadn't seen extjs, but maybe I'm alone when I prefer old fashion ULs & LIs for lists and grids and so on. I haven't seen anything that a framework does that betters this. However, I'll look more into extjs. Thanks for the tip!
Some other questions:
- When do you plan on releasing your git bundle for TextMate? :)
- Has there been any gotchas when using Joyent's Sun platform?
- Did you consider using extjs? (http://extjs.com/tutorial/using-ext-grid-ruby-rails)
Thanks again for posting.