The other day I did an interview with Rodney Gedda about RubyOnRails. The resulting article was just published in the online edition. All very exciting we think.

The article mentions the SchoolSeek site, that we are currently rewriting in RubyOnRails, and I just thought I would expand on some of the points that are touched on in the article.

The other day I did an interview with Rodney Gedda about RubyOnRails. The resulting article was just published in the online edition. All very exciting we think.

The article mentions the SchoolSeek site, that we are currently rewriting in RubyOnRails, and I just thought I would expand on some of the points that are touched on in the article.

When we built the site (originally called WhichSchool?) we used C# and the ASP.Net framework. We created a database structure that allowed for a wide range of information about the schools to be stored, with flexibility the overriding principle. Basically that means that the database could adapt to store different types of information about different schools. We used a technique called Container Managed Persistence that is more often seen in the Java world, mainly because it provided a layer of abstraction between our business objects (the bits of code that do all the interesting stuff) and the database (the place where all the information is stored. Without getting too deep into the whole procedure the approach requires some config files that provide a link between the database structure and the business objects.

This is all very good and well when we were building the application, but when it comes time to do some maintenance work, or to start adding new features, it can quickly become a little scary. So, when the fine folks at SchoolSeek asked for some additions to the site, we initially reacted with a little fear at the amount of tedium we would be in for. We sat down and scoped out the work and realised the changes would take about 25 hours. It was at this point our natural desire to work on cool stuff in preference to boring stuff kicked in and we thought “Hey, you could redo the entire site in RubyOnRails in about 30 hours couldn’t you?”. To which the only answer was a resounding yes. Benefits from this decision: it meant we actually wanted to do the work and would mean that future updates would be barrel loads of fun as well. All good.

So we sat down and did it. We’re almost done (hopefully getting ready to launch the revised/rewritten/improved site later on this week) and so far we’re sitting at about 18 hours. And that includes building it so we take advantage of some of the damn cool features of RonR – Migrations being the best. We’ve got a few features to finish, but they are mostly pre-existing areas that just need to be replicated.

And the new features that would have taken so long in C#? Well, we did that one morning waiting at the car dealers for our car to be serviced.

Nice.

Edit: Fixed a broken link to Migrations