Welcome to ChemFinderPG!

As a note, this is meant to mirror the standard version, but provide a separate and entirely segregated version control, as well as simply because I struggled with my Heroku deployment initially, and continued to develop and ran into database issues, so now I have two apps. That is entirely separate from the issues that spawned the whole ChemFinderTwo debacle… that was learning how to use git properly. So with each version comes new skills, that now include some SQLite3, PostgreSQL, Git, Heroku (kinda/sorta), and more!

This is a project designed for two purposes:

First and foremost this is meant to serve as a learning platform as I write my first original, functional, and hopefully useful Rails app.

Second, this should serve to expedite the chemical tracking, finding, and requesting for the Lipperd Lab at MIT.

The intent of the finished app is to allow a user to log-on, search for a chemical by name, CAS number, or functional group, and find what is currently available and see the size and quantities as well as the exact location.

Being that this is the first app I’m attempting to create, it will be woefully inadequate for legitimate usage by anyone outside the tightly-knit community of people which I tell about it… or random people who find it online for whatever reason.

Probably so that this can come back and haunt me some day.

I used scaffolds to set up the preliminary models: chemicals and functional groups. I’m not really sure I need to use an ActiveRecord model to track the functional group, but it seemed like if I ever wanted to add more information it would be best to implement them as a model, not just an attribute of the chemicals themselves. Also, the relationship seemed ripe for practicing use of the has_and_belongs_to_many association, which serves purpose number one of the app.

Finally none of this is meant to be overly helpful or useful to anyone but me- this is a learning process, after all.