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by xionon 4375 days ago
This looks pretty neat. Looking forward to you getting the disabled features ironed out.

Some notes:

* Project generation with most of the features and a couple models is taking a really long time. I'm sure it's a background job, and I could walk away if I wanted to, but it'd be nice to know that the system would email me to let me know when it was done

* Sometimes UI widgets flicker when switching between sections. I'm guessing a lot of those styles are being added with Javascript, not CSS? You might consider switching to a CSS framework that gives you a good look and feel, but doesn't have to call some JS function to apply styles.

* The auto-capitalization on model names, and auto-lowercasization (?) on field names, was a nice touch, and made me feel happy about the product.

* It would be really cool if users could write and submit plugins / hooks. I'd be interested in background jobs that weren't DelayedJob, and deployments that weren't Heroku, for instance.

* I'm guessing that "public repos only" is a temporary feature, because GitHub doesn't have a way to authorize an app to write only to certain private repos, correct? Because most of my work is on private repos, and I can't see my organization using something like this without the ability to create projects (even scaffolds) privately

* A feature for Vagrant would be nice :-)

I'll be watching this! We've currently got several people switching from ColdFusion to Rails; they're good programmers, but they don't know the ecosystem or the conventions. This gives them a really good starting place. Thanks for sharing.

Edit: Also, this is the first time I've seen app/views/elements/, and I'm kinda pissed I haven't thought of using a different directory for partial layouts before. Now I've got some app/views/layouts/ directories to clean up...

1 comments

Really appreciate the detailed feedback.

* Email on generation is a good idea. Also, I don't have a Gem cache system yet which will help.

* Flickering is because some of the inputs have to compute a lot of values @ Backbone model layer. Definitely opportunity for optimization.

* Thanks :)

* A lot of users have asked for user contributed features. The problem is it's hard to extract an API from my generation system but I hope to in the future.

* Very doable. I just haven't written private repo support in because I'd have to deal a lot of auth/selection issues which isn't a priority right now.

* Vagrant would be great.

For a lot of these, I just don't have time yet but all candidates for the future.

Thanks again.

Re the auth issues, why not let people clone / download a zip direct from you, skipping the github auth.
presumably each step is being done as a git commit, so there'd need to be a git install done locally for creation, then zipping, then cleanup afterwards. I don't think it's unreasonable, but I'm guessing there's some 'post to github' gem that's being used directly right now and this other option would require more work.