Aside from dealing with preparing to move in January and other things, I’ve been playing around with the Ruby on Rails interface. It might wind up being all I need, for a while. And the Ruby classes that wrap the database could be used by other interfaces also, eg a Ruby/wxWidgets standalone program, or a console-based application/view.

Some stumbling blocks though -

I’d assumed it would be pretty easy to synchronize information to a website, ie you have your local MySQL database and one on your website, and just click a button and have them synchronized. Well, maybe if you pay a lot of money for a program to do that. I don’t know if there are any open source programs that will do that. (update: Daffodil Replicator does). MySQL does have replication, but it’s only in one direction. Maybe other databases are more advanced in this area? The concept is pretty simple - surely somewhere out there is code to do this? If not I’ll have to separate out my NeoMem related objects and import them to my webhosts’s database, so I can start hosting this site via Rails.

Which leads to another issue - finding a webhost that will let you host a (possibly unstable) Rails application. My current host (1and1.com) doesn’t seem to support Rails. So I’m looking into others. And it’s not fun. eg this discussion. Hosting Subversion repositories would be essential also.

Another problem is that web hosts don’t like to give you direct access to your database - you usually only have access it through a web interface, like phpMyAdmin. This was (not welcome) news to me. Though programs like Navicat or SQLYog have tunnels to let you access your database through the normal routes. But they cost money.

Of course, all of this would be moot if I had my own webserver. Which is not something I am prepared to deal with at this point (or ever, really), and obviously should not be a requirement for using NeoMem to run your website. The complexity involved with running a Rails application does mean there would be an opportunity for a small business though, to host users’ data, say on the neomem.com domain. But that’s not my focus at this point.

So those things are throwing a few wrenches into my plans to have this site being driven off of a database. It’s still the goal, but I don’t know how long it will take to reach it.

Anyway, that’s where things stand at the moment. I really would like to get the source code for NeoMem 1.1 hosted online this month - I might wind up just throwing it into SourceForge if I can’t find a decent webhost for now. And yes, export and import and bugfixes are high priorities - hopefully I’ll be able to at least start on some of that this month.

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