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.

1. Lakeway
T E C H N O L O G I E S
Rails in the Wild:
Frontier and Outpost
Rino Jose, Ph.D.
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

2. About Frontier
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3. About Frontier
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4. About Frontier
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5. About Frontier
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6. Deployed as VM
+ 50 STEPS
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7. Deployed as VM
+ 50 STEPS
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

8. Deployed as VM
+ 50 STEPS
VMWare
Converter
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

9. Deployed as VM
monit + nginx + mongrel + cron
+ Hyper-V
+ 50 STEPS =
>1 year at customer site
without issue
VMWare
Converter
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

10. Data Warehouse Architecture
users
User id name email task_key
User name
email
task_key
tasks
Task id name effort_left project_key
Task name
effort left
project_key
projects
id name target date
Project
Project
name
target date
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

11. Data Warehouse Architecture
users
id name email task_key
tasks
id name effort_left project_key
projects
id name target date
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

12. Data Warehouse Architecture
users
id name email
Dimension
task_status_facts
task_key project_key assigned_to_key effort_left
Fact
tasks
projects
id name
id name
Dimension
Dimension
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

13. Data Warehouse Architecture
users
id name email
Dimension
task_status_facts
task_key project_key assigned_to_key effort_left
Fact
tasks
projects
id name
id name
Dimension
Dimension
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

14. Graphviz gem
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

15. Graphviz gem
./configure --enable-shared
make; sudo make install
config.gem ‘graphviz’, :version => ‘1.0’
Add wrapper classes
&
Package as graphviz.gem
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

16. Flash + Rails
<div id=“viewer”>
</div>
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17. Flash + Rails
<div id=“viewer”>
Data rendered in HTML
</div>
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18. Flash + Rails
<div id=“viewer”>
Data rendered in HTML
</div>
ExternalInterface.call
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19. Flash + Rails
<div id=“viewer”>
Data rendered in HTML
</div>
ExternalInterface.call
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20. Flash + Rails
<div id=“viewer”>
</div>
ExternalInterface.call
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21. Flash + Rails
<div id=“viewer”>
document[“viewer”].doSomething()
</div>
ExternalInterface.call
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22. Partial to Partials
<%= render(:partial => “partial”)%>
Markup + Javascript =
Frontend Snippets
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23. Partial to Partials
<%= render(:partial => “partial”)%>
Markup + Javascript =
Frontend Snippets
<%= render(:partial => “partial”,
:locals => {:key => 12} + :locals
)
%>
Frontend Objects
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

24. Partial to Partials
<%= render(:partial => “partial”)%>
Markup + Javascript =
Frontend Snippets
<%= render(:partial => “partial”,
:locals => {:key => 12} + :locals
)
%>
Frontend Objects
params = {};
params["project_key"] = "<%= project_key %>";
new Ajax.Request('/projects/show_loading',
+ Ajax
{
asynchronous:false,
method:'post', Dynamic Frontend Objects
parameters: params
});
COPYRIGHT © 2010, LAKEWAY TECHNOLOGIES LLC

25. Partial to Partials
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26. Partial to Partials
projects/hoverbox_content.html.erb
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27. Using Heroku
Easily scalable MySQL
gotchas
Nice selection N o direct
of a dd-ons d atabase
access
Friend lier than Ch anges to
ca pistrano how you
troub leshoot
p tpost.he roku.com
E asy setu h ttp://ou
using git
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28. Lakeway
T E C H N O L O G I E S
Rino Jose
r.jose@lakeway-tech.com
(408) 518-0489
www.lakeway-tech.com