So it’s been awhile since I checked in with any HYDRAtweet news. Things are still going on in the background:
After some continued pushback from CodeIgniter, I finally came to the conclusion that what I really wanted and needed, was Rails. So I made my second platform hop, this time completely away from PHP.
The specific considerations that went into this decision centered around my continued velocity as I worked on the application. With CodeIgniter, I felt I gained a bit of time up front, but didn’t really save any going forward. Not that there was a lot of friction with ongoing development, but it wasn’t as fast as I feel it could be with the right framework.
There were some things here and there that I felt Rails gets right and CodeIgniter does not, but the final straw was when I drafted my crawling strategy—the automated collection of Twitter data—and realized there was no provided way to include CLI scripts that were a part of the CI app and had access to all of the code I was building there. And of course Rails has Rake.
My personal history with Rails and even Ruby is spotty. I pick it up for a little bit, as often for personal projects as one-off day job needs, and then because I’m usually employed to work with PHP, six months or a year goes by before I touch it again. But I always enjoy working with Ruby, and Rails is likewise a pleasure to use.
So at this point I’ve written some parts of the application three times, and some pieces have yet to be rewritten as I’m getting back up to speed with Rails and what the current landscape of gems and plugins looks like. But with each successive iteration it’s taken less effort to replicate what was previously built, attesting, I suppose, to the value of prototyping.
Some news about the application itself: as you can see in the teaser above, I’ve decided to launch a free beta, that will likely roll into grandfathered full accounts for free, even though I expect to use freemium pricing once beta testing is complete.
I should note that the above feature list will likely not be complete when the private beta begins, but I hope to have the complete launch feature set complete before entering a brief public beta. Well that’s the plan anyway….