How designers work with developers

What is iKnow! ?

　Over the next month I will be giving you an inside look at what it is like to work as a designer/developer at a successful social website.

　We will look at some of the technologies and processes that are employed in creating a web application and examine the territory of the presentation layer, the crossover zone between developer and designer, and in a similar way, the user and the system.

　Do you know iKnow!? iKnow! is a free social learning web application for learning language that was launched in October 2007 and currently has over 220,000 registered users.

　At its core iKnow! consists of a web application and rich interactive learning applications that together allow you to manage social activity around learning and to learn faster and remember longer.

　The web application is developed in Ruby on Rails and the learning applications are developed in Adobe Flash.

　In this series we will be concentrating on the web application and paying particular attention to the activity of designing and developing the web application interface using contemporary programming languages, interface development techniques and organizational work flow processes.

Development with Ruby on Rails

　The iKnow! web application and data services are developed in Ruby on Rails. Ruby on rails is a relatively new web programming framework, that makes it easy to develop a simple web application from back to front in a short space of time with a minimum amount of code.

　One of the benefits of framework based development is that it allows efficient coordination of large and sometimes dynamic development teams, as it reduces the amount of custom knowledge associated with one-off development solutions.

　The Rails framework follows the model-view-controller (mvc) pattern. Most if not all of the interface code files are found in the app/views folder and for interface developers when implementing designs into the application, this is where you will be touching a lot of files. Along with the file system framework, Rails also provides a conceptual framework for elegant web development.

　The framework encourages best practices with regards to naming conventions and code syntax. Rails is platform independent so I choose to do most of my development on Windows XP using Aptana Studio as my IDE, however some designers may be more comfortable on Mac OSX. iKnow! is currently running on Rails 2.0.