Enterprise CRM on Rails: 700 Migrations and Still Counting

Stefan Kaes (Stefan Kaes - IT-Consulting und Systemsoftwareentwicklung), David Anderson (Folklogic.com), Larry Baltz (Folklogic.com)

11:35 Wednesday, 3-09-2008

General
Location: Saal Maritim A

Presentation: Enterprise CRM on Rails_ 700 Migrations and Still Counting Presentation [ZIP]

Average rating:

(2.41, 17 ratings)

In our talk we’ll provide an overview of system functionality and scale, and show how several key aspects of the system were implemented using Ruby on Rails and other open source technologies.

Given the size of this project, we faced challenges that don’t come up in most Rails projects, such as managing 700 database migrations, and transforming and importing large volumes of legacy data. We will discuss areas where we found Rails worked well for a larger-than-average project, and areas where we had to be a bit creative in order to make things work.

In particular, we’ll focus on

how we implemented fine grained authentication and authorization on controller action and object level
how we managed large scale data migration issues by task parallelization using a self built computing grid
how we leveraged Rails technologies, gnuplot and Latex to build a flexible reporting system

Various concerns are often raised concerning the adoption of Rails in the enterprise—performance, (un)availability of experienced ruby programmers, risks associated with using a dynamic language, etc. Often these discussions miss the real benefits (and risks) of adopting Ruby for a complex enterprise project. Through this case study we hope to shed a little light on this subject.

Stefan Kaes

Stefan Kaes - IT-Consulting und Systemsoftwareentwicklung

Dr. Stefan Kaes has been involved in Rails core development since early 2005.

He’s running a blog focused on Rails performance, has contributed more than 40 patches to Rails core and developed several Rails plugins, available from RailsExpress.

He’s the author of railsbench, a development tool for performance measurement of Rails applications.

He’s currently working as a Rails consultant for AutoScout24. In addition, he’s started work on a Rails book for Addison Wesley, focusing on writing efficient Rails applications. The first finished chapter is available as a “shortcut” on informIT.