Pleased to announce… trialbyfire.biz

After many months of nose-to-the-grindstone design/development/testing, I’m please to announce the launch of my new web app trialbyfire.biz.

It is a rich internet application to help clinical study teams manage drug trials (my wife is a clinical study guru and co-contributor to this app). Our goal is to provide an easy-to-use tool, which streamlines and simplifies the complicated task of running global clinical drug studies. It includes items like: milestones, outsourced vendor management, sites, enrollment, site visit calendar, etc).  The app falls into the general category of CTMS (clinical trial management system), but focuses on the study management process (often managed directly by the sponsor company).

trialbyfire.biz uses Ruby on Rails 2.0 and MySQL on the server side, with ExtJS and JQuery on the client to provide the slick UI widgets and AJAX processing. ExtJS is a fantastic javascript widget library, providing robust and slick UI components. It was key to help meet our objective of making a web app to look-and-feel like a desktop office app (in a short timeframe).

I am using the rails gem Ruport to assist with the reporting/metrics suite. It provides a nice wrapper around the PDF-writer gem, to produce PDF documents from your rails app. Ruport has many great reporting features, so check it out.

trialbyfire.biz is currently in a limited beta release, and we will get some screen-shots up on the home page to better showcase the features and usability.

Born Again, on Rails

Having spent 10 years in a Java-centric world, it wasn’t easy to say goodbye. But now, I have moved-on to world of Rails, and I haven’t looked back. Rails has renewed my thirst for building apps in the same way that Java did 10 years ago. These days, world of Java seems to be growing in complexity, while diminishing in terms of intuitive, maintainable, quality code. Sure there are still a lot of great Java coders out there, but they seem overshadowed by the undisciplined masses. Not only was I burnt on J2EE, but there was a new twist in my road. My wife is a guru in clinical drug trial management, and we had designs on an application to help address some of the core productivity/visibility issues that she faced time after time on the global trial circuit. I needed an agile, rapid, web development environment.

Enter Rails. The world of Rails was boasting all of the qualities that make my inner-software-engineer happy (in particular rapid-application-development on an intuitive yet comprehensive framework with a supportive and enthusiastic community), and it appeared to be a great fit for my new product development effort. So I decided to put it to the test. Now, six months down the road, Rails has delivered for me in a big way. Sure, there have been pitfalls along the way, but the flexibility of Rails, along with an awesome community of developers, has allowed me to stay productive and focus more on my functionality than code. Engrained MVC, simple ORM, db schema management, convention-over-configuration, code generation, … I could go on for days. The developer in me feels born again.