I’m about to start on a real estate 2.0 site in southern cal and am trying to decide between using the 2 technologies. I know php and don’t know rails, but I’m very intrigued by it — especially the “MVC framework” part, in that the development is very organized (and separation of logic & presentation is done etc.) Two questions for you:

1. What made you switch from php?
2. Are you still happy that you made the switch? Are there any shortcomings that you realize now (that you didn’t see before)?

thanks very much for a great site and your inspiration.

Thanks for the feedback. More to come soon!

We have one database box and we use rails migrations any time we change the database, so we just run the migrations on the deployment server when we deploy a new release. Slick!

We haven’t had the need to do serious profiling yet, but there are tools for it when we hit that point. We also plan on having a dedicated database person when we start seriously profiling.

Thanks for the complement. When I get ready to do Zearch 2.0, I’m going to be less model, have more AJAX/DHTML goodness and be more like ShackPrices, etc…

Until then, I’m just going to work on being fast, because speed never goes out of style.

Galen,

What do you use for database stored proc debugging, schema/data comparing & synchronization and profiling? Does Postgress or MySQL have any of the database development goodies that MS SQL has available? EMS SQL Studio seems pretty decent, but I’ve never tried it (I use Red Gate for whatever MS doesn’t put in the SQL box). I’ve yet to find a profiler or debugger for an OSS DBMS. I assume they exist? (or at least I’d hope they do).

My only complaint with Zearch plotting is that you lose my zoom level whenever I click on a listing

Oh, and it’s a little weird in that it’s “modal.” I start browsing with a list (similar to shackprices), but as soon as I click on a listing, I’m in individual-listing mode and generally stay there as I click on more homes.

In any case, thanks for all the choices you guys are bringing to market. I hope you both become billionaires.

I hate implementations that plot nothing if you have too many results. I think you made the right trade off.

I’ve used one that required you to zoom in until the number of plots was under 300. What a poor user experience, especially when I’m at a zoom level with, say, 301 homes in view.

How about this? Auto-zoom to whatever level is required to fit whatever your plot limit is. If I zoom out past that, give me some indication that homes are in the list box that can’t be displayed, but just leave the newly exposed map unplotted.

When we were building the map component, Google maps was actually much slower at adding the points to the map, so we compromised quantity for speed. They’ve dramatically improved the loading speed, so we’ll be upping our default display number soon. Given the choice between “over 400 homes match your search, please zoom in to see any” and “1,000 homes match your search, showing the first 400, I’m still going to go for the second option.

At some point in the future, we’ll obviously display more general neighborhood and city information when you’re zoomed out and house-specific information when you’re zoomed in, but that’s an entirely new can of user interface worms we’re not opening right now.

An increase over 50 would be nice, but having some sort of icon for all homes in the displayed area would be ideal.

If I can’t see them, I don’t know they’re there.