Note: This is a guest post courtesy of our friends at Thoughtbot

What if we told you that you can build a killer web application in 48 hours? Impossible? No!

Dream the impossible dream. Reach for the unreachable star.

Rails Rumble

Registration for the third annual Rails Rumble opened earlier this week. That means it’s time to start picking through your backlog of web app ideas, pick one, and recruit your team to make it happen.

Rumblestiltskin can help with that process.

For a love of meta, Rumblestiltskin was developed quickly (less than hour from concept to production prototype, another couple of hours of polish) using the same techniques we’ll be using during the Rumble.

Trends in gems & plugins usage

Last year, the Ruby Railsways blog released trend data on gems & plugins usage based on the Rumble.

We were most surprised by the lack of diversity in Rails templates (what the blog post calls “Skeleton applications”).

Rails templates

We have been using a “Rails template” for a few years (back in the ’ol Subversion days!) but on September 30, 2008, we converted it to a git repo and named it Suspenders.

We use Suspenders for all of our clients’ applications and our own products. Three teams competed last year from our office and all used a Rails template.

We highly recommend using Suspenders or another template such as Bort or Blank for your Rumble app. With only 48 hours in the competition, you want to spend as much time as possible on the actual application.

Fork away

Suspenders’ opinions include, but are not limited to:

• Test::Unit, Shoulda, Factory Girl, & Mocha for testing
• Capistrano for deployment
• Mongrel for web serving
• Hoptoad for exception notifications
• Prototype/Scriptaculuous for Javascript
• The flash, session key, & other “basic” items should be pre-configured

The full documentation is in the README_FOR_TEMPLATE.

If you like some, but not all of these opinions, fork away. For example, maybe
some of these items will come in handy for the Rumble:

• Cucumber for acceptance testing
• Faker for fake data
• Fakeweb for fake responses
• Paperclip for file uploads
• Clearance for authentication
• Gmail SMTP for email
• Google Analytics for usage analytics
• jQuery for Javascript
• Delayed Job for background processing

Remember that to stay within the rules this kind of preparation should be open source. The reward awaits…

The Championship Belt

For the third year running, we’re proud to sponsor the Rumble’s championship belt.