Yesterday we launched Mini Match, an application me and my colleagues from work wrote for Cartoon Network.
Late last year we opened a beta that was, unfortunately, short lived. Friday (May 30, 2008) we opened the system up on a much improved codebase for a few hours and had all systems “green”. Based on the positive success from Friday we opened it up yesterday.
It opened slowly at first with just a small advertisement on the Cartoon Network Games’ Page, and then a larger one on the same page and then we made the Cartoon Network home page with a small advertisement again. Today, I reckon, a larger advertisement will be put on the front page and we’ll really start to see traffic!
Some details on the application:
- Flash/Flex/AS/Whatever front-end GUI (really, it’s one of them)
- Java-based persistance server
- Rails-based funnel into the database with a bit of logic.
The Rails part is RESTful (for the most part) and is the “glue” of the application, to quote someone from IRC.
Today should be a fun day!
Okay it’s a lame title but whatever.
There’s a new release of Reve today (Release 76) and it can be installed as a gem!
gem install reve
And that’s it.
Reve also has a project page at Rubyforge (http://reve.rubyforge.org) but I’ll still host everything, sans gems, here on crudvision.com.
An autogenerated changelog is available from Reve’s trac but a quick overview is:
- Support to convert between Character ID and Character Name
- Fixed a ParseDate problem reported by Paul
- Now available in .gem format
- Move reve.rb to lib to fall in line with more standard practice. This should be seamless upgrade unless one expicitly required reve.rb
Reorganised other files into a subdirectory.
Enjoy!
(Edit at 2008-02-02 19:20 GMT: Fixed the Rakefile to include lib/ruby/*.rb as that’s where the meat of Reve now lives. I imagine the .gem should be mirrored soon.
I appologise for the screwup here but this is my first gem! 
I’m getting used to the process still. It beats .tgz and .zip files though.)
I’ll admit it. I haven’t gotten around to learning Capistrano 2 yet so many or all of these issues may be solved.
One of our clients at work has a very bizarre deployment environment. To be brief (without getting sacked) it involves svn replication, shared NFS directories and a dedicated deploy box. They also have this setup twice, once for production and once for a “staging” environment.
Since they copy our SVN tagged release to their own SVN repository it means the Capistrano script doesn’t actually do the mirroring (yet?); that is done by the client. I wrote a helper bash script that will take the tag, environment (production / “staging”) and a capistrano command to select the right capistrano script, set the right environment (although now that I think about it this is redundant now) and run the command.
But there has to be an easier way to “One Click” this with Capistrano 1.x. It is my task to find a recipe to do it!
The problems are, due to the convoluted nature of the deploy environment I may have to abuse roles or invent my own or hack Capistrano to add qualifications to roles (similar to :primary): The dedicated deploy box is the box to which the application is deployed (acts like an app server!) but it doesn’t/shouldn’t run any mongrels. In a sense it’s the primary app server since it has the authoritative source that’s shared to other app servers.
But it isn’t! It’s a nightmare! It needs to be better done. I may try to one-shot this: sh deploy.sh SomeTag production deploy_first or deploy_upgrade.
