Web 2.0 Stores > Fast, Simple, Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce

jQuery has had a recent set of interesting news, so we thought we should write it up: jQuery works nicely with Rails. Geoff Buesing assumed that switching his Rails application from Prototype to jQuery would be a pain, but then discovered that you can write jQuery-formatted Javascript with RJS templates, out-of-the-box, no special helpers or modifications necessary.

The trick is to use the RJS element proxy syntax -- page['someid'] -- which outputs the Prototype syntax $('someid'). Just replace someid with a jQuery selector, and method_missing magic will handle the arbitrary jQuery methods chained to it.

Some examples: Ryan Dunphey wanted an OS X dashboard widget to give him "simple, searchable, offline access to the API", so while on a plane, he developed it. This is great PR: Wordpress 2.2 migrated to jQuery due to Matt reading criticism such as this. New Plugins A couple of new plugins include:

• jTip: Tooltip support
• tableFilter: a simple filtered table

Around here, we’ve been hosting projects on the web for the longest time. However for the last couple of years most of our development has been rails-centric, and hosting providers haven’t been helping at all. Like us, there are many companies out there who are using rails to deploy applications for their clients or their own projects. Rails hosting is a growing necessity but the existing solutions are either mediocre or dumb. And when I say “dumb” I mean the provider doesn’t even know how rails scales or operates - all they know is they have it and that it “should work great out of the box” - and, you guessed it, it doesn’t.

Here’s what developers need

We need hosting companies that care about people developing web applications and the people that end up using them. We need the service to be reliable, because critical applications that don’t tolerate downtime. We need providers that understand the necessity of having an application up and running fast and with as little trouble as possible. We need providers who don’t hide behind support forms, and actually speak the same language as ourselves. Companies like us, and many others, care deeply about the quality of service you people offer. Are there providers out there thinking and speaking “2.0″? If so, we definitely want to hear from you.