In a departure from our usual posts, we’ve got some news about the hidden workhorse of Many Eyes: the server side application. If you’re interested in the technology behind Many Eyes, read on. If not, feel free to skip to the last paragraph to see what this means for the future of the site.
Since November 8th, you’ve been using the new Ruby on Rails version of Many Eyes! You may have used it already if you’ve used the New York Times’ Visualization Lab.
Doing a full rewrite of an application is not something to be taken lightly, but we’re confident that the move to Rails has been well worth it. It’s been a joy to develop, and the site is running faster than ever.
“Faster?” We can almost hear you say. “I heard Ruby was slow!”
While it’s true that Ruby isn’t the fastest executing language around, Ruby is faster in a few important ways. It’s taken less time and fewer lines of code to produce equivalent functionality in Ruby, and it’s been easier to optimize the application. In the end, this means our application actually runs faster.
Last but not least, there have been a few small changes to the site, such as the new dataset tag cloud and the ability to change your display name and profile under “my stuff.”
So what does this mean? It means that Many Eyes is now running on a system that is more flexible and easier to maintain, which will allow us to add new features more quickly. With that in mind, we would love to hear your feedback! What would you like to see on the site next?
November 21st, 2008 at 11:10 am
Nice. Talk about transparency. Now that you’re running on Rails, might I suggest opening up some functionality in an API. You know, like uploading data
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:48 am
Could we also have the ability to tap into the data available here through an API, pleeeezeee =).
November 22nd, 2008 at 6:57 am
Awesome! I had no idea. And I’d like to third the above suggestions — an API to load in live data would be a huge plus. Of course, you built the app RESTfully, right? So, the API should be cake.
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:09 pm
[...] Many Eyes blog » Blog Archive » Many Eyes on Rails In a departure from our usual posts, we’ve got some news about the hidden workhorse of Many Eyes: the server side application (tags: manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com 2008 mes10 dia21 blog_post visualization rails ruby_on_rails) [...]
November 23rd, 2008 at 8:55 am
The API idea seems like the next step (communitywise?! - if that’s even a word…).
Anyway, I’d also really like to see some sort of recommendation features for data comparison. It would be a challenge to do correctly, but I think it would be nice for comparing points of view and data sources.
Loving the rails!!!
March 16th, 2009 at 2:00 am
Just found this site and love it!!! I was looking at processing last year to try and do pretty much what you guys have done with visualising data.
The one thing that would be awesome to see is being able to have private data sets. Being able to use this as an insight tool would be incredibly helpful to the business I work in however much of the data we want to visualise is private.
Looking forward to new features!!!
March 24th, 2009 at 5:50 am
I like the argumentation “the Ruby version is faster because it’s simpler, so we had more time to optimize it”. Too often we forget that we live in a world of limited resources, the first one being time.