After just three weeks of frantic work, my team today released the first public version of PlantCollections, a joint venture of the Chicago Botanic Garden and 29 academic and corporate partners.
Our app serves as the consumer-facing front end for a Google Base collection of plant specimen data compiled by scientists and gardeners all over the world. This project represents my first experience with Ruby on Rails and Pathfinder’s first experience progressively enhancing a Rails app with jQuery. Although this is still little more than a prototype, with lots of additional functionality to come, we’re pleased that this first release is already out in the wild. Go, agile, go!
To learn more about PlantCollections and our involvement in the project, check out the press release. Otherwise, just head straight to the application itself.
[...] posted before about my experiences dropping jQuery into Rails and making it work. I’m not a huge fan of the tight coupling between a specific JavaScript [...]