Sunday, March 19, 2006

i5labs pushing the limits of Rails

Posted by marcel

In November, PlanetMoon launched Infected, a first-person shooter game for Playstation Portable. The PSP game has two-pieces, one, the actual PSP game (which is C++), and a statistics reporting tool (how many kills did you get, how many people did you infect, where in the world are they). Any time someone wants to grab their stats, it kicks in the PSP Web Browser, which points to a Ruby on Rails server. The team behind this is Jason Wong’s i5labs. Jason blogs about some of the challenges of working within the constraints of PSP console.

i5labs also just finished a Zubio chair massage kiosk at the San Francisco Shopping Center. You schedule 10 or 20 minute massage sessions using a touchscreen, then swipe your credit card. The touchscreen system is implemented with Rails. Jason shares details of the code and hardware.

i5labs is also looking to hire a part time Ruby on Rails developer (who could eventually go full time). If you’re interested drop them a note at jobs@i5labs.com.

We’ve seen the limits of Rails pushed before, when Mike Clark and James Duncan Davidson mixed Rails with Cocoa with VitalSource. Anyone else using Rails outside of the traditional web context?