Akbar Rafaq Is Released August 13th, 2007
I know about Rails from the last year. I have bought the book (Agile Web Development With Rails first edition). Did the exercises. I also have read many articles about Rails. But I did not have a single complete Rails project. Back at the time when I was doing my thesis, I must write a program. So I used Rails. But the project was doomed because of the factory for the thesis had a very unclear requirements. The project was never finish. But my Rails skill was upgraded however.
But I still didn’t have a single complete Rails project. So in June or July, I started to write Rafaq so I can have a single complete Rails project. Yesterday the Rafaq is finished with its website. I host the project in RubyForge.
From the summary in its website: “Rafaq is knowledge base or frequently asked question (faq) web software. Questions divided into categories. A category can have many questions. User can propose a new question and ask a question. Admin decides the fate of proposed questions and asked questions. Rafaq has i18n feature. The only translation for now is Bahasa Indonesia. It has backup feature. Rafaq can use another theme too.”
How can I come with the silly name (rafaq)? I need a unique name. Rafaq is Rails Faq. Pretty cool, huh?!!!
Writing Rafaq made my Rails skill upgraded too. I use three gems beside database binding gem. RMagick for image manipulation, archive-tar-minitar for gzip manipulation, pdf-writer for pdf manipulation. I use nine plugins. Acts_as_authenticated for login, foreign_key_migrations for improving foreign key manipulation in Rails migration environment, globalize for i18n feature, redhillonrails_core as foreign_key_migrations dependency, selenium-on-rails for testing Rails with Selenium, simple_captcha for captcha validation, tiny_mce for rich text editor feature, validation_email_format_of (it’s clear), and will_paginate for pagination purpose.
This is the first opensource project that I use unit testing and control version. Wallpapoz use control version but not unit testing. It’s pretty hard to test GTK+ gui application. Exzoost does not use any. I can assure you that unit testing and control version are very important.
So what is Rafaq future? Unknown off course. But I think I want to upgrade it a bit by bit. Maybe in next release, I want to add statistic feature, or tag support.
So what are you waiting for? Grab it.