University of Notre Dame on Rails
Posted by David September 20, 2006 @ 04:36 PM
John Nunemaker wrote to tell me that the University of Notre Dame has picked up Ruby on Rails and is using it for their forum site. About the implementation, he writes:
The live webcast area is using rjs and such to capture live notes taken by viewers and update live photos from flickr without interrupting the stream of the video. The site takes advantage of Rails page caching and has a small admin area which updates the various sections of the site.
Cool stuff! Have you seen Rails in use in academia elsewhere? Tell your story in the comments.
Do you have a link to that quote?
I work at a University and I’ve been trying to get them to let me implement a RoR website for my department’s website, but the response was very…
Let’s just leave it at that. An article on how this came to be would be extremely helpful.
At the University of Glamorgan, we use Rails for our blogging software e.g. http://genomics.weblog.glam.ac.uk/ and http://difference.weblog.glam.ac.uk/
RoR figures quite heavily in many of our ‘intranet’ apps.
The University of Cincinnati has re-built their online storage service, UCFileSpace, in Rails. The lead developer was Ryan McGovern and the XHTML/CSS designer was Ian Monk. This was an internally implemented project. Full details on the project can be found at LongInt/Blog.
We have switched to Rails for web development here at Gonzaga University. Nothing public yet but we have a stack of legacy apps that we will be rewriting.
We’ve used RoR here at WVU a bit. We’re using it to write a CMS (who isn’t, right?) called slate. We launched our first public site using it for the English dept. at http://english.wvu.edu/. Screenshots of the admin interface can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmolsen/tags/slate/ It’s definitely a work in progress.
My name is Brennen Florey and I’m the webmaster for the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Myself and programmer Matthew Isleb have created Homeroom, which is a course and community management system for the students, faculty and staff of PNCA. Homeroom was originally written in PHP, but over the course of the last year we re-wrote the entire system in Ruby on Rails and its been the most fun and enlightening experience I’ve yet had in web development.
Homeroom is really taking hold at PNCA this year, as well. There are 500 members in the community and 80 classes and clubs to follow. Plus every person has their own personal space to create digital portfolios of their work.
The really sneaky part is that we’re also using Homeroom as the CMS for http://www.pnca.edu, the main college website. I can give a department head a Homeroom site, tell the person to blog or uplaod PDFs, and then use API calls to publish anywhere we’d like.
I’m at Ohio State and I work for a small department in the Health Sciences school. I’m on the same path as Paul from Gonzaga. A bunce of PHP distance ed sites that I’m currently rewriting in Rails and I’ve got 2 new sites in development also using Rails.
I’m at California State University, Chico (Chico State for short) and we’ve developed and deployed four rails apps (mostly internal to the IT department) and have a couple in development. We also run an instance of typo for one of our developer blogs. Our development used to center around PHP or perl for “small jobs” with most of the “big stuff” being done in J2EE.
The J2EE stuff isn’t going anyway (uPortal/CAS), but a lot of the new development, at least in our area, is going to rails. In the move to rails we also jumped from cvs to svn, BBEdit to TextMate and started using Capistrano to ease deployment. We develop on OS X and deploy on RHEL 4/Apache2/MySQL4/FastCGI.
We never want to go back and we’re slowly infecting other departments. Rails is a great tool to have in our box of developer goodies. We got started with the AWDwR book and went on to Rails Recipes and Enterprise Integration with Ruby and of course the Pick Axe 2nd Ed.
INSIA (Paris, FR) slated 90% of all new intranet developments this year (4 to 7 projects) to use RoR. Ruby and RoR are also now part of the curriculum.
We’ve built an enrolment app for the Psychology faculty of the the University of Amsterdam, a stats course http://www.drstat.net/ (english translation is in progress), an assessment tool for the Hogeschool Utrecht and we’re currently working on another assessment tool for the INHOLLAND University.
Some stuff that almost got made can be found at http://www.fngtps.com/2006/03/lowering-the-tco and a bit of the assessment stuff can be seen in the screencast at http://stuff.vandervossen.net/external/2006/tests_en_vragenlijsten.html
There´s a semantic web open-source academic project born out of my masters thesis that I built on Rails available here:
http://www.tecweb.inf.puc-rio.br:8000/hyperde
@Josh Charles – I feel your pain. I haven’t written an article on the details, though we should have a case study within the next month or two that I’m sure we’ll release.
Wow. The comments are encouraging so far. I didn’t know of any other universities using Rails with the exception of West Virginia.
I would love to hear from other universities and colleges using Rails. Setups, servers, on or off site, IT department reactions, and such would all be very interesting. Leave a message here or contact me directly from my website.
I work at the Center for eResearch and the Center for Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. We have been using Rails there since March of 2005. There was some resistance by our IT staff at first, but as long as we had our own server (maintained by them), they didn’t really care. Since then, there is at least one other group using Rails and the Rails setup expertise among the sysadmins in our IT department is slowly growing.
We currently have five sites/projects using Rails:
Center for Studies in Oral Tradition This is the home site for the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition founded by John Foley in 1986.
Oral Tradition Journal Just launched this last week, this is the academic journal that helped establish oral tradition as a comparative field of study.
SyndicateMizzou This site is used to promote research and creative activity at Mizzou in the researchers own words. It consists of of an ongoing series of interviews in streaming video (Flash) and other audio and video formats. This is a custom built system that uses Rails on the backend to script the video rendering and metadata insertion.
Center for eResearch Web site This is a simple Typo blog we use for our eResearch site.
MU Serves This is a site for the Office of Service-Learning that allows students to search for non-profits in the community with whom they can do community service for school credit. It has an intranet and extranet to it.
I’m getting ready to write up the building of the journal site and will post it at that time.
It’s so great to hear of everyone’s projects! Keep ‘em coming!
When I was at the University of Southern California, I setup/built several applications for the USC Libraries. Looks like the Hieraki install I setup is still being used as the USC Libraries Document Repository (http://dotsx.usc.edu/repository) and the Course Reserves system I built (http://www.usc.edu/libraries/course_reserves/) is still being used university-wide to put thousands of items on reserve each semester.
At the International Baccalaureate Organization, a non-profit educational foundation (http://www.ibo.org) we’ve been managing the publication of our curriculum materials with an internal RoR application (thanks Marcel, Sam & Koz ;-) which went live in Jan 2006. Develop on OSX/Ubuntu, deploy on Apache2/mongrel/RHEL. Our focus is now on RoR applications to marshall our XML document production process (we lurve XML situps).
I’ve deployed 3 (well 2 and a half) Rails projects for Kansas City Kansas Community College, one of which is mission-critical (the job application). Curiosity made me learn about RoR and my ensuing passion for it was enough to convince my boss that it was the best solution. We’ve been happily running those two apps for about 6 months now, with few problems.
Would you guys reccomendo ruby for a designer? I’m not a programmer so I’m wondering whether I should start with PHP or Ruby.
The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire is developing applications for various administrative departments using Rails. I’ll be speaking at HighEdWebDev in Rochester, NY in October about Rails and how developers can take advantage.
It might interest people to know that we currently deploy on Windows.
I am so glad to hear all these schools using Ruby and Rails. This is fantastic!
The eXtension project (http://www.extension.org/), which is aiming to collectively bring all of the land grant colleges’ extension programs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_Service_of_the_USDA) in to the digital age, is primarily using Rails for their sites. In particular, the Terralien crew has done a lot of the development on their main site (www.extension.org), and most of the development on two semi-backend apps (news.extension.org & calendar.extension.org), all in Rails.
While the overall eXtension project is still in the formative stages, it’s on a trajectory to become a very well-trafficked Rails project. I can remember making use of college extension services back when I was homeschooled, so I’m pretty excited that those resources are becoming even more readily available.
At the university of Antwerp, Belgium, we are going to launch an internal application that allows students to choose projects. Goodies include full LDAP integration and authentication…
Here at the University of Waterloo (http://www.uwaterloo.ca) we have been using RoR for a campus events system that support Microformats:
http://calendar.uwevents.uwaterloo.ca/
A blog agregator (not launched yet):
http://blogs.uwaterloo.ca
A conference site:
http://powerofideas.uwaterloo.ca
...and a web app authetication system:
http://kiwi.uwaterloo.ca
Next up is a news release management system, a feedback ‘letter to the editor’ type thing called UW Opinion, and maybe even a podcast management application. My office is now fairly committed to RoR.
I’m a student at Vesalius College in Brussels, Belgium, and I’ve created our Alumni Survey Application using RoR. It allows administration staff to set up custom surveys to ask new alumni and collect and view the responses in nicely formatted graphs.
I’ve now also been hired to create a website management system for them to design and maintain the couple of websites they need. (It’s going to be some kind of hybrid between a CMS, a Wiki and an editor like Dreamweaver, appropriately named Chimera, am very exited about it)
My group at University of Alaska has deployed a couple different rails apps in support of our local academia and users. The biggest one was an undergraduate research project tracking database:
http://ugres.gina.alaska.edu/
A fairly successful project so far and during the process of developing it, others in our group signed up to the idea of using RoR for a variety of other tasks.
The UCLA Statistics Consulting Forum is our first Rails application:
http://consult.stat.ucla.edu
I’m working on two more. One is a journals application which will have a public interface and the other a contacts application for internal use.
I am an instructor at the Madison Area Technical College and we have started teaching a course on Rails. I am hoping that this might lead to the college using it for development.
+1 for the HighEdWebDev Conference in Rochester. We at WVU are really looking forward, Brian, to your talk on Rails there.
Down at Singapore Management University we have a collaboration and community calendaring application built on Rails. After seeing what can be done with RoR in a short amount of time lots of students are taking an interest in it.
I am working with the University of Arizona’s Arizona Daily Wildcat to put up our weblog (http://wildblog.arizona.edu)
Just as a follow-up on my first post because of interest we’ve received. We updated our reasons for slate, a CMS developed for West Virginia University, along with a more robust feature list.
The Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston (TcSUH for short) has been using Rails since early 2005. My concentration has been developing our internal applications, all of which use Rails. We’re also about to launch our launch a new version of our public website.
We at Eastern Mennonite University have been developing Rails apps for nearly a year now. Our external site was fairly mature, so everything new we’ve developed in the last year is behind a login
- nothing to show :(.We use Collaboa for managing our development and have extended it to support Scrum with burndown charts and all!
We are looking at CAS and wishing it were a Rails app since we don’t have in-house J2EE experience and we want to extend it to support password reset for LDAP and signup for “web-only” accounts. Anyone want to collaborate on building a CAS-protocol-compliant clone?
@Jason Garber
We use CAS here with our Ruby on Rails stuff as well as our Java stuff. I am extremely interested in working to develop a Rails clone of CAS but I am super strapped for time at the moment. Let’s talk though! bphogan at gmail.
We just finished a scheduling and managment app for the Music Department at George Washington University (no link, behind a firewall). It made use of ajax and rjs, and replaced an earlier PHP app.
We are currently using RoR to make a simple student record system. RJS has made it really easy to create quick and effective forms that replace the non-web apps they were using before.
I have also being involved with the Open source PHP education system Moodle. Has anybody thought about making a similar system for RoR?
If not would anybody be willing to help start such an endeavor?
With a small grant of the Philosophy dept. of the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen I am currently developping LogiLogi Manta (http://www.LogiLogi.org/MetaLogi/LogiLogiManta) an innovative Open Source note- and informal idea-sharing system for students (and others), in RoR. This system tries to combine open-ness with quality of content.
I am developing a small LIMS (Lab Information Management system) For biology labs (academic scale) (I’m developing it for several labs in the agriculture faculty of the Hebrew university in Israel) the greatest advantage for us is the ease of customizing a rails app for each researcher. The results are great considering the investment of time and resources.
You can check it out @ www.bioldata.com or contact me for details john@biolodata.com