For Touradero, my second Ruby on Rails baby I used the following techniques:
plugins/libraries:
- attachment_fu
for uploading and handling images - geokit
for geolocating the Venues - YM4R
greatest plugin for doing all the GoogleMaps stuff - prototip
Javascript library for easy rendering of complex tooltips - Redcloth
to allow Users to rich-format their content - calendardateselect
a great datepicker with rails integration - a sligthly tweaked version of John Resig’s prettyDate snippet
to display several timestamps in the format “3 weeks ago”
techniques:
- partial caching
… I heavely used partial caching to keep this baby fast - MySql full text search
after trying around with ferret I decided to use “MySql full text search”. For me it is the best choice, even though I had to learn some things about it.
The whole system is running on a busy 256 MB VPS using mod_rails and Ruby Enterprise Edition. … and for that low server profile I am quite happy about the speed.