For the past 4 years I’ve been using evite to manage the RSVPs for our memorial day weekend party. Given that it’s a pretty large scale pot luck event, it’s helpful to have a system where people can respond with a message that others can see. The reduces my need to field “what should we bring” questions, as you can easily see what everyone else is bringing and react accordingly.

Evite sucks. While it doesn’t force attendees to make accounts, it makes it look like it does. The evite.com emails tend to catch as spam. And the interface is now dubious under firefox. The idea is still good, but it hasn’t really ramped with the trends in the rest of the service web application space.

One of the key things I wanted in an evite replacement is getting rid of user logins. Given an event, and an email address, you can come up with a unique key that qualifies that person for that event. That means the user just follows a link, and they are in. Links are unique for people. If you make the key a hash of the person’s email and some secret seed key for the event, you’ve got something cryptographically strong as well. No one can modify another person’s entry because the key needs to match before you get any info.

Saturday was a rainy day, so I built this system. By Saturday night I had most of it working, and had rolled this out live by Sunday afternoon. This was my first rails 2.0 app, so I needed to catch up on a few things along the way. Things I learned:

• Rails 2 creates scaffolds in a slightly new way. That threw me for a bit, as I had already built models for most of my objects before creating scaffolds. The new way (putting attributes on the command line) looks like it is designed to make rails tooling easier.
• ActionMailer is crazy easy. It even does multipart mixed emails really easily. My mhvlug mailer script for month announcements is going to need to be converted to this at some point.
• Rails has a word_wrap function in the view context. Of course it does, why did I even doubt that.
• The google maps API is impressive. I had maps based on event location within 60 minutes of signing up for my Google Maps API key.
• The f= param on maps.google.com is which fuction to drive. q: location query, d: directions. That took a little bit of reading urls to realize.
• It’s pretty easy to integrate mercurial push to auto restart a rails app if it’s running under passenger.
• If you are running multiple versions of rails applicatoins under passenger, delete all the rails links in vendor/ so that it picks up the right rails environment.
• arround_filter in rails is really handy to catch generic exceptions and dump people off to an error page that isn’t the default rails one.

All in all, I was really happy how this turned out. As soon as I get some free time I’ll genericize the bits of the app that I coded just for our event, and get this out on rubyforge. I only wish there was a rails equiv of gems, as I’ve still found that it isn’t entirely clear how to best package a rails application as an easy to download open source component.