[LRUG] e-petition site gone live: built in Ruby with an Agile team

[Chris Parsons]

Hi guys,

You might like to know that the e-petition site that just went live today is a Ruby application:

http://direct.gov.uk/epetitions

Stack:
- Built in Rails, with MySQL + Solr search backend.
- nginx + unicorn ruby stack
- Running over 4 servers (2 app + 1 DB + 1 search)
- Running a customized version of chef-solo for automatic server config.

Team:
- Agile team (Jolyon, Will, Tom + Alan from Unboxed, and me)
- Built in six weeks with 3 two week iterations.
- Scope variable, cost/time fixed. Scoped changed a lot as we went.

Some press: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14326218

We're pretty proud of it: go check it out! I'll probably blog some more details at some point.

Thanks
Chris

--
Chris Parsons
chris.p at rsons.org
http://twitter.com/chrismdp
http://pa.rsons.org