JQueryMobile app with Facebook integration and a Ruby on Rails backend

I am currently playing around with mobile app development.  I want to develop a mobile app that:

1. Works across multiple devices (iPhone, Android, etc)
2. Integrates with Facebook
3. Has a Ruby on Rails backend to store app-specific data

I have implemented a toy jQueryMobile app to demonstrate the implementation of the above requirements. The toy app simply asks you to login with your Facebook credentials and lists your friends.  You can try it out by visiting http://jqmfbror.heroku.com using your mobile or desktop web browser.  The full source code for app is available at https://github.com/dilip/jqmfbror.

Facebook authentication happens at the Ruby on Rails backend using the Omniauth gem.  This means that the backend can uniquely identify repeat visitors and associate app-specific data with them.  The backend can use the Facebook access token generated on login to retrieve the user's Facebook data, and pass it on for display on the frontend.  Alternatively, the backend can simply pass the Facebook access token to the frontend, which then uses JSONP to retrieve the user's Facebook data.  The latter approach is more efficient as it decreases the load on the backend.  The toy app uses this approach.  

The app also uses MongoDb (instead of mysql) and Heroku (for super-easy hosting of Ruby on Rails applications).

Infographic Resume Creator

A few months ago, I came across some real cool infographic resumes - http://blog.chumbonus.com/infographic-resumes/.  Since I didn't have the Photoshop/Illustrator skills to make my own, I decided to make a web app to automatically create a basic infographic resume from my LinkedIn profile.  Thus http://inforesume.heroku.com was born.  All you need to do is log in with LinkedIn.  Do check it out.

If you want a more fancy infographic resume, http://vizualize.me/ will probably be useful.  It's a startup announced on Hacker News just yesterday.

Craigslist Car Finder

I bought my first car in 2006 through Craigslist.  Searching for a used car  on Craigslist was a pain -- there was too much junk.  I found myself wasting 2-3 hours every day sifting through craigslist postings looking for good deals. So I wrote script to automatically parse craigslist car ads and show me only the ones that may be of interest to me.   This script helped me and at least four of my friends find a great deal. on Craigslist.  Hope it is useful to you too.

The script has the following features:

• Allows you to look for only specific car models.
• Allows you to ignore coupes.
• Allows you to specify price and year range.
• Allows you to ignore manual transmission cars.
• Compares the price of the vehicle with the Edmunds True Market Value price and highlights good deals.
• Highlights car with low miles.

Here is the script: craigslist.tar.gz.

In 2006, PERL was the only scripting language I knew. It was an absolute horror to do object oriented programming in PERL.  I wish I knew Python and Ruby back then.

If you find the script useful or find bugs, please do send me an email.