Kiranatama

With one dedicated developer, since early 2008 until late 2009, we develop, deploy, and maintain for a US client a social networking application for party goers.

Interesting experience include:

• Integrating the beast pl...

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With one dedicated developer, since early 2008 until late 2009, we develop, deploy, and maintain for a US client a social networking application for party goers.

Interesting experience include:

• Integrating the beast plugin with to the Rails app. For example, login to the Rails app means logging in to the forum as well.
• Using shoulda as the test suite
• Using SWFUpload. Although it's better to write our own Flex for upload with progress bar.
• Instead of writing h() all the time for potential malicious content, we use a useful plugin called cross_site_sniper

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The client is an established internet business company in the US that has and sells a collection of more than 100k+ works of art essential for teaching Ancient Art, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Non-Western, Early Christian, Medieval, Renaissance, etc. Its clients are mostly educational instituti...

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The client is an established internet business company in the US that has and sells a collection of more than 100k+ works of art essential for teaching Ancient Art, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Non-Western, Early Christian, Medieval, Renaissance, etc. Its clients are mostly educational institutions.

In early 2008 and until now, our three developers come and serve as the sole maintenance and upgrade team for this existing Rails application.

Interesting experience includes:

• Careful usage of ActiveRecord vs direct SQL statements because of the large data sets that we are manipulating
• Image slideshow using Lightbox
• Image zoom and pan using javascript, combined with the slideshow
• Using Prototype Window for login form.
• Using Internet Imaging Protocol (IIP) to display, zoom, and pan large images (each about 50MB)
• Using Rjb(Ruby Java Bridge) and jexcelapi(excel parser/writer for Java) to be able to import a large spreadsheet faster
• Using shoulda and cucumber
• Using factory_girl fixtures replacement
• Using CruiseControl for automatic build tool /continuous integration tool

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Built in early 2008, this site is an SaaS that allows video uploads from real producers or advertisers (so no user-generated videos like youtube)

These video uploaders subscribe to the site, and can make money by setting a price if another user wants to view or download their videos. Read more >>

Built in early 2008, this site is an SaaS that allows video uploads from real producers or advertisers (so no user-generated videos like youtube)

These video uploaders subscribe to the site, and can make money by setting a price if another user wants to view or download their videos.

Although Amazon S3 would be a good choice for storage, interestingly this project uses Nirvanix. Nirvanix also allows video conversion to FLV, and creating video thumbnails. There is a Ruby on Rails gem for Nirvanix written by its developer that we used: nvs-sds gem.

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The company runs a chain of retails stores across the US, selling fashion and accessories. What we did is create a website that not only acts as an online store, but also as a promotional tool.

For example of such promotion, we built a contest module where people can upload their own d...

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The company runs a chain of retails stores across the US, selling fashion and accessories. What we did is create a website that not only acts as an online store, but also as a promotional tool.

For example of such promotion, we built a contest module where people can upload their own designs and others vote. The winner gets some prize. We also change the contents at least once a month. This way, it always looks up to date.

The ecommerce module itself is pretty standard. The things that are interesting include:

• Getting files from the warehouse, and create scripts to import them to our database
• Integrate with NSB, which provides solutions to inventory, merchandising, and order processing. What we need to build is the SOAP consumer module for this.
• Integrate with InternationalCheckout, to handle international orders.

This project is being done between late 2006 and early 2008.

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We built one Ruby on Rails application in early 2008 to become a platform to launch multiple online stores with ease.
Technically speaking, we have multiple views/ directory that hosts the different layouts among the online stores.
We also use different databases for each stores....

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We built one Ruby on Rails application in early 2008 to become a platform to launch multiple online stores with ease.
Technically speaking, we have multiple views/ directory that hosts the different layouts among the online stores.
We also use different databases for each stores.

So, the Rails app connects to multiple databases and generate different views depending on the domain that sends the request.
The rest (controllers, models, etc) are the same.

The advantage is obvious. Our client can have many customers in a fast and scalable way.
There is no need to code anything if there is a new client. Simply HTML / CSS.

This is a big project, taking about 6 months to do both the frontend application and the backend. And it's worth it.

Other interesting technologies in this project include:

• The use of Active Resource when it's not yet included in the default Rails package
• Using memcached because the app is potentially hit by many visitors. We use multiple memcached servers to cache sessions, page fragments, variables and objects.
• Securing certain pages and form submissions with HTTPS
• Shopping cart system handles reservation of a quantity of products that's in the cart for a period of time
• Caching the result of ajax requests using javascript variables. The second time the Ajax is called, it doesnt hit webserver!
• Writing a custom Rake task that enables us to migrate multiple databases at one run
• With the warehouse in a certain city, and we need to give accurate shipping estimate to customer, we have to take the customer's timezone and the warehouse's timezone into calculation
• Integration with Orderwave to handle their inventory, ordering, and shipping.
• Extracting the uploaded zipfile and processes each files within. We use rubyzip in this case
• Because the specs are complex, and attachment_fu's features are limited, we code the image manipulation logic ourselves. For example, it asks to resize first and then crop exactly in that order
• Convert PNG to JPEG, and give a background color to the previously transparent area
• Lots of cool Javascript features

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