Show HN: My New App for Building a Roadmap

I am the lead developer on Aha!. We built it to help product managers and developers collaborate on features and roadmaps. We have been working around the clock (well, almost) for the last few months and today we finally allowed open signups. We ran a private beta (http://blog.aha.io/index.php/great-beta-programs-a-contraria...) and got lots of great feedback from a group of really engaged users. This was a big change from my previous startup where we ran an open beta and had thousands of users, but little useful feedback.

I have been writing Ruby on Rails applications for a long time now, but it was a real pleasure to start from scratch using the latest version, and all the wonderful gems that are now available.

We wanted the UI to feel really responsive, and to allow almost real-time collaboration by multiple people. The underlying technology is Rails, with as little Javascript/CoffeeScript as possible, but with extensive use of Faye (http://faye.jcoglan.com/) to enable real-time notifications between users, and also to update the screen of the current user in response to their own changes. This allowed us to focus more energy on the Rails backend, and put all the business logic in one place without giving up the real-time user experience that a Javascript framework provides.

Between Faye and Rails' Turbolinks, I've been really pleased with how easy it is now to get great performance out of a Rails app.

Kudos to Chris and the technical team for delivering Aha! The feedback from the beta was tremendous. We are thinking about how to open source some of the original components that the team built for analytics, notifications, and real-time page updates.