Did you ever considered using Ruby on Rails ?

[Tarek Demiati]

I was just wondering why you decided to use Perl & JavaScript ?

I'm wondering if you've evaluated Ruby on Rails for developing
socialcalc ?

How many people are currently being core contributor to this project ?

[Tony Bowden]

Tarek Demiati wrote:
> I was just wondering why you decided to use Perl & JavaScript ?

I'll let Dan answer this part, as he was the one who made the decision!

> I'm wondering if you've evaluated Ruby on Rails for developing
> socialcalc ?

A lot of what SocialCalc does would be non-trivial to implement in
Rails. Rails does a fantastic job of making a certain type of job
exceptionally easy, but SocialCalc doesn't really fall into that.

Of course it would be possible to implement everything in Ruby, and if
you'd like to try porting - go right ahead, and let us know how you get on!

> How many people are currently being core contributor to this project ?

Up until now pretty much everything that's in SocialCalc was written by
Dan. Now that the project has been taken on by Socialtext, Casey and I
will be doing most of the hands-on day-to-day maintenance and
development, freeing Dan up to concentrate on developing some much
bigger project ideas. We're also being more than ably assisted by Liz,
but we need to work harder at getting her to actually contribute to the
code rather than just people wrangling!

We're keen to make it much easier for other people to contribute as
well, and, more specifically, want to enable plugins and addons that
don't require having to hack about with the core. We've a long way to go
to make that as trivial as it should be, so if anyone is trying to add
any functionality, even just for their own use, please let us know how
you get on, and what we can do to the core to make it much easier for you.

Thanks,

Tony