Starting to get itchy fingers

I still have a few more edits to do on the Blaze Foley documentary film but I'm starting to get excited about working on the reservation system again. In particular, I'm looking forward to seeing Lee's changes to the code (the nested models especially) and how the public-facing interface will look.

A friend of mine showed me a website he's been working on for the past few months and maybe that's what's gotten me into the groove of working on the reservation system. Looking at it, I realize that I really need a designer to create a new look for the website.

Since I can't dive into the code at this point, here are some more thoughts about Phase II of the project.

Checking for availability may be the most difficult aspect but I hope not. Getting the pickup date and time from the user plus the return date and time should be all it takes. And hopefully a named scope can be defined that takes the two datetime values and returns the set of all available contractables. The part that will make this easier will be the reservations table, where the physical, individual equipment items (as opposed to the nested packages of equipment items) are stored with the dates for which they are reserved. Keeping that table consistent and accurate will be the key to making it all work.

I don't know if this reservations table should be rebuilt periodically or just checked for accuracy on a periodic basis. But the table should be capable of being re-built on-demand from the other tables in the database.

Oh -- and I decided today that instead of running everything on Ruby on Rails, it'll run on .NET using VB on triple redundant Windows Server 2003 servers. Looking forward to joining the happy few who use this thing called Microsoft. (BTW, this was posted on April 1, so don't get fooled!)