In one of my previous posts, I mentioned Da Good Bitz. Da Good Bitz is the site that led me to Rails and Ruby. It was my pet ASP.NET project. I felt like there were lots of cool ASP.NET tools for a connect-the-dots approach to rapidly building a web app. I found myself writing a lot of code whose differences were mostly the types, and there was lots of code duplication between NHibernate's XML and model/factory code. There had to be a better way. Once I saw Rails, I immediately dropped the project, even though a very rough but working version of the app lives on here.
The purpose of the app was to provide a web based version of an army builder... much like Army Builder. The difference being that this one would be optimized for Warhammer 40K, a wargame close to my heart. I hadn't worked out all of the legalities and specifics (it might be something I do hand-in-hand with Gamesworkshop themselves). I also wanted to add in some social features such as the ability to share army builds and comment on them, etc.
For funding, I was thinking about advertising with local game shops, and use localities to make sure the ads were pretty targeted. That part wasn't hashed out very much. I wanted to interview some local store owners to ask what would produce the most value for them, and take that angle.
I'll be starting this project up again, but this time in Rails. I think I can do a better job this time, and make it pretty from the start. I'll be a great chance for me to test out JRuby and glassfish deployment, and well as brush up on Rails proper (although I'm finding out that the pieces of Rails I've been using in Monkeybars have kept me pretty current).
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