Next Tuesday, June 26th 2007 we’ll meet at Dubai Marina Towers Walk, in Hakawati cafe starting at 8:00PM, so if you are a Rubyist, a Railer or just interested in Ruby or Rails, stop by and join us, the more we are, the more fun it’s going to be.

restate.ae is a real estate portal for the city Dubai, but it’s not just another portal out there, it’s built from our need to be able to find a property in an easy, reliable and affordable way. We didn’t find the portal that satisfies our needs and we believed we can do our own so we ended up doing it ;).

The two main key points we had in mind when developing restate.ae are:

• A better search: Because every property has a lot of attributes to search with, the most common search mecahnism out there is the advance-search, which I personally hate, specially when I need to search over and over again, so what we did is to simplify this concept, use some Rails love and Ajax magic and create a filtering mechanism that let you find your property a click at a time.
• More information: To ovoid being a classified-listings website we worked on collecting and genrating more information of every single property we list as much as we can, we used the listings information we’ve got to generate realistic statistics about locations and we always kept the place for users to express themselves and interact with each other.

Thanks to Ruby on Rails, we were able to launch restate.ae in a relatively short period of time, Rails also helped us extract a comprehensive codebase out of restate.ae which we’ll start releasing some of it sometime soon as open source Rails plugins.

So whether you are looking for a property, interested in Dubai or just procrastinating here, please give restate.ae a quick visit and let me know your thoughts, we really appreciate every feedback we receive.