It starts with a need. Too many corporate websites deployed as copies of earlier sites. Too many changes between copies, maintenance is a nightmare. Functionality changes between versions make fixes complicated. Costs for creating new sites are high. We need a change.
Change requires courage and vision. Our team has the courage, our brand new CIO Anil Kottoor has the vision. So we made a proposal: Convert our aging .Net web platform to a Ruby on Rails implementation. Convert our multiple deployments into one codebase. Move from compiles & deploys for content changes to true Enterprise Content Management with workflow. We know we're just like many medium sized corporations out there. We know because we've all been at many other medium sized corporations with just the same problems.
The vision requires scalability. We get 6 million hits on our 10 corporate domains each month. That isn't much compared to some, but it's enough to cause our IIS servers some grief if we don't have well written code.
I've created this blog and invited my web team to join me in sharing our journey with you. Our posts may be sporadic or infrequent, or they could be stacked up like cordwood when we have major breakthroughs. We're getting the chance to live the dream of nearly ever web developer out there : we are creating our web vision from scratch and on the platform of our choosing.
We know just how lucky we are to have this chance and we're going to do it right.
Strategically we're not able to release any information that will give our competitors an edge. We probably won't even mention our industry. We certainly won't mention our company's name. But we're hoping you'll enjoy hearing about the ride. We're really happy to be in the position we're in.
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A corporate web development group discusses Ruby on Rails development.
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Who?
We're an enterprise web development group that's just been given the task of rewriting our .Net websites in Ruby on Rails. Our size (10 developers) and structure (a business analyst, a project manager and a manager who codes) make us fairly unique in the Rails universe. We're hoping to share our struggles and successes in the hopes of facilitating future corporate Rails development.
5 comments:
Congratulations on deciding to make the jump to Rails. I'll be really interested to read about whatever you do. Good luck!
Jeff
softiesonrails.com
Brian, thats awesome news to hear. I believe I am finding myself in a very similar situation to your own.
I'd love to read more about your idea's on Enterprise Content Management and how you plan on realizing this with Rails (i.e. do you have a CMS in mind?).
In the environment I am currently working within developers do not have permissions to restart server processes or even to modify production database strucutures. Both of these limitations are making my personal crusade to push Rails a bit of a struggle.
Needing a sysadmin to run a `rake migrate` (against a custom database.yml file with elevated database permissions) will be a maintenance struggle going forward. Also, needing to bother that same admin to restart the "Mongrels" or restart the "fcgi Daemons" to deploy a new cut of the app will also be a maintenance struggle (not to mention restarts due to crashes).
Do you find yourself in a similarly restricted situation?
-Chad J
@Jeff - thanks for the kind words. I've been reading SOR since you made it live.
@Chad - Yes, we'll be similarly constrained by production control issues, but part of this process will be to make Rails fit in that world. We can't make the enterprise conform to Rails.
Brain,
Good news to hear. I very much so look forward to hearing about your solutions to these issues.
From what I can tell there isn't a real open dialog going on anywhere in a public forum discussing this!
-Chad J
@Chad, That's my motivation. We will be crossing obstacles that others will be hoping to cross soon, so I want to share the ups and downs of the process too. For the greater Rails good, even.
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