Migrating To Rails 3 - An In-house Developer's Perspective

Working as an in-house developer can present a unique set of challenges. A large percentage of our apps are intended for internal use and even those apps that are customer facing will include an internal admin interface. Because of this, each new app needs a base set of features.

Our in-house development tools have transitioned to open source technologies like Ruby on Rails, mysql and apache. Likewise the patterns that we have come to apply for rapidly developing in-house apps have evolved. This presentation is going to give attendees an in-depth look at what these patterns are and how we apply them at OPNET using Rails 3.

• Core models/migrations and synchronization
• Shared data/resources
• Batch Processing
• Using a base app as a seed for templates to create new apps
• Custom database.yml setup
• Exception emails
• Single sign-on user authentication using Devise
• Application specific configuration definition
• Access control using declarative_authorization

We will discuss the various alternatives considered and some of the pitfalls experienced that has led us to our current approach.

As part of the presentation we will make available, through github, a example template that can be used by others as a starting point.