It has been about ten days since we first started writing the AsiaQuake realtime relief database system. Two programmers using Rails (and learning all the 1.0 features) managed to accomplish this much functionality:

• a login system with four levels of permissions: read, write, manage, and admin
• a missing person database
• a phone number database
• a volunteer database
• variously sorted table listings for all of the above
• search boxes in all tables
• export of all to data XML and CSV
• approximate matching and soundex search

Our next items are

• a table for infectious disease outbreaks like measles
• a table to track supply requests, shipments, fulfilment, and use
• a hospital table
• email alerts based on status changes for persons or supplies

So far, we’ve been very pleased at the level of functionality we have achieved in this short timeframe, and we think it validates Ruby and Rails promises to be many times faster than the older CGI approaches.

If you’d like to find out more, check out our application at:

http://www.asiaquake.org/

Anybody can get an account without an email address now so feel free to poke around. Feedback will be much appreciated.

To read the first part in this series, please see http://cilibrar.com/~cilibrar/erblog.cgi/Tsunami/TsunamiReliefRails.txl