I recently wrapped up my second major project in the past year - SportRPM.com.

There's not much I can say about SportRPM in terms of the business, and unfortunately, most of the best work is behind the wall of NDAs and passwords.

What I can say is that working with a small team of Rails experts - including Toby Sterrett at 120db.com - we were able to build a killer Rails application using the latest features in Rails. I was inspired by David's talk at RailsConf 2006, and decided that building the new SportRPM application using REST principals would be the best way to approach the project.

It worked out great. We developed using Edge Rails and were able to launch the application right around the time Rails 1.2 was delivered. The timing was great. We were ahead of the curve and able to take advantage of some of the new Rails 1.2 features such as 'map.resources' from day one. I am convinced that by using REST we were able to keep a very complex project manageable. By sticking with conventions, we were able to keep the code simple and easy to manage. The best part of using REST principals was that SportRPM got a free API with their application, something they can use in the future to monitor and interact with their application.

We also decided to use Engine Yard for hosting and in the process discovered a great service. A site like SportRPM.com, which frequently experiences a large number of transactions in a short period of time, cannot have any downtime. The guys at Engine Yard helped us setup several slices to keep the app constantly available.

All told, it was a great project and I look forward to using what I learned about REST principals in future applications.