Friday: Mapping Rails To Legacy Systems

By Stephen Becker IV & Devon Jones

rails at vonage

• subscribe system
• metrics mole
• restful services
• vfax
• numerous other existing apps
• multiple rails projects in development

key strategic elements

• change gradually and consistently
• small programs and projects
• transparent interaces

small projects succeed

Change gradually and consistently

• people fear change
• small projects are low risk projects
• adjust course rapidly
• show success early and often

small programs

• break up business logic into atomic chunks
• small scopes – create small and simple services that do their job and interface with others well

transparent interfaces

• design for visibility to make consumption, inspection and debugging easy
• output in a predictable and dependable way
• allows for easy re-use

Rails tactics for legacy

active record in legacy databases

• database degredation
• documentation
• a non standard database schema
  • 8 different ways to represent false
  • date as a varchar

User interface integration

• transparent proxy
  • noodle
  • transproxy and squid
• single sign-on keys

did it work?

• quick time to market
• maintainability
• testing
• reduced lines of code
• repurposing old data
  • maps
  • metric
  • project tracking
  • testing

where does rails fit

• rapid prototyping
• mission typical tasks (non business critical)
• cost analysis
  • development time vs. hardware

is it ready?

• greater focus on rails in apache (not on, in, think mod_php, etc.)
• rubyvm
  • jruby, yarv, parrot
• user commented docs
• cookie-less sessions
• composite keys