Website upgrade 2011

December 19, 2011

< 17 December 2011:

This website, robertomurray.co.uk was PHP and running (slowly) on a shared hosting server.

> 17 December 2011

The website is now on a new server and the site is mainly Ruby on Rails

Switchover

OK, here there are two major changes; 1) Migrating to new server and 2) re-written using Rails, which actually forced change #1. The previous hosting company was not very good, or rather the product and service I was getting was not very good and the final problem was not able to host rails apps properly so this forced me to migrate to a new server on which I could install whatever I wanted.

The reason for actually using Rails was because changes to dynamic pages – by dynamic I mean server processing and returning data, eg database interaction or just plain old php code – took so long to re-write, create, test, etc because they were mostly custom written, varied dependencies and sometimes overly complex. This meant that development was slow and awkward – not what web development is about.

The goal was fast, easy development, idea to deploy time as short as possible; one method to achieve this was using an MVC framework and so I tried various PHP frameworks such as Symfony, codeigniter but these did not meet the criteria I wanted. And then I got hooked on Ruby on Rails.

With Rails, I found the language, the style of programming and the design fantastic; simple concise and functional.

 

    @travels = Travels.all(:order => "id DESC")

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html # index.html.erb
      format.json  { render :json => @travels }
    end

 

The framework fits exactly with agile development methodology, with the addition of some extra tools such as Capistrano I can so easily add/change features, test and deploy in minutes. The site currently is 50% of what I want but I can run the site as it is now and add the extra features incrementally without a problem, each push adding functionality.

I have had to solve a few problems along the way such as;

 

Hopefully this will make adding new features quicker and easier, not only to this site but for other projects too. Enjoy and check again soon!

 

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