This talk was part of the Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails meetup on Mar 11, 2010.
It describes some of the techniques used by Lakeway Technologies in the development of Lakeway Frontier, a project management automation tool.
Lakeway Frontier is deployed as a virtual appliance running Ubuntu. Here are some of the technical features.
* A data warehouse architecture is used instead of the typical rails ORM approach. This enables efficient analytic queries slicing across the data in different ways.
* Frontier uses a Flash viewer that rails can interact with via javascript and the DOM to render some neat graphical views (workflow, task graph, effort distribution, schedule). This interaction is bi-directional.
* Partials are leveraged quite a bit in a number of novel ways. Ajax is used to make the app very dynamic.
* Frontier employs a gem-wrapped graphviz library to enable the app to lay out task graphs dynamically.
Lakeway Outpost is a tool for doing high level resource planning. It is deployed on heroku and is available at outpost.heroku.com.