Maintaining a Legacy Rails App

April 5th, 2011

Last night I deployed a new release of a Rails app.

Having deployed apps built with Rails 3 or at the very least Rails 2 apps using Bundler, the experience of deploying a Rails 2.3.5 app left me with a keen desire to at least bring this app up to Rails 2.3.11 with Bundler.

One of the delights of last night’s deployment was having to update RubyGems on the target machine. Usually this is as simple as:

gem update --system

That is, unless you are forced to upgrade to a specific, old release of RubyGems. Being at Rails 2.3.5 with this app, we were in this situation.

Speaking of “not exactly state of the art”, the version of Ruby on the target machine is Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6.

Obviously, the preferred option would be to upgrade to Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0.5 forthwith.

However, it’s not my money that will be funding the upgrade. First steps first. I’m aiming for the following path:

• Rails 2.3.11 with Bundler and latest compatible gems.
• Ruby 1.9.2
• Rails 3.0.5

Wish me luck!

Tags: legacy apps rubygems rails ruby | Comments (0)

Rails Camp 5 and Sydney RORO Meetup

June 11th, 2009

I think it’s time I gave a brief update about a couple of professional events within the Australian Ruby community that I’ve recently enjoyed.

Rails Camp 5

Last month over an extended weekend the fifth Australian Rails Camp was held in the Queensland Gold Coast Hinterland. The venue was superb, much fun was had and a great deal of thanks is due to the Brisbane contingent who organised the event.

Having started the weekend working on my own to improve my iPhone development skills, particularly with respect to using ObjectiveResource to integrate an iPhone app with a Rails backend, I was actually very pleased that I didn’t continue on this path beyond Saturday afternoon. From Saturday evening onwards I teamed up with Martin Stannard and Michael Koukoullis to develop a Heroku-like tool called Bivouac. I thoroughly enjoyed our collaboration and learnt much from it. For anyone else considering attending a future Rails Camp I thoroughly recommend getting involved in a team project rather than working alone.

More on Bivouac in a later post. Meanwhile, you can find the source on github.

Sydney June RORO Meeting

Earlier this week the monthly Sydney RORO (Ruby on Rails Oceania) meeting featured a dozen lightning talks. In one of my talks I shared a technique for providing XML in a legacy format via REST, XML Builder and a presenter object. Whilst the example is contrived, the technique is one that I used to handle a requirement for a client recently.

Here are the slides:

In fairness, I must give credit to Obie Fernandez for his coverage of XML Builder in his book, The Rails Way, which gave me a head start.

Tags: railscamp legacy apps rorosyd xml rails | Comments (0)