rails for legacy apps

Patrick Crowley

Rails for Legacy Apps

(How to use Railswith existing apps)

• New ideas

• New ideas

• No users

• New ideas

• No users

• Zero code investment

• New ideas

• No users

• Zero code investment

• Best case scenario

But, in the real world...

• Legacy content

• Legacy content

• Existing userbase

• Legacy content

• Existing userbase

• Front end (HTML + CSS)

• Legacy content

• Existing userbase

• Front end (HTML + CSS)

• Database Schema

Q: How can I use Rails with a legacy app?

• Don’t! (Leave site as is)

• Don’t! (Leave site as is)

• Reboot site with Rails

• Don’t! (Leave site as is)

• Reboot site with Rails

• Or, maybe...

Use Rails as a control panel to run your site

Case study:Cinema Treasures

PHP/MySQL

pMachine

Front-end

Smarty

Theater DBBlogs

How did we edit theaters?

phpMyAdmin(sadly)

• Intended for developers

• Intended for developers

• Easy to harm database

• Intended for developers

• Easy to harm database

• Doesn’t scale

Why not roll your own?

• Not highest priority

• Not highest priority

• Busy with other things

• Not highest priority

• Busy with other things

• I never want to write PHP again.

Let’s do it in Rails!

Basic concept

Database

Current site

Database

Current site Rails

Demo

Issues I ran into

• Non-plural table names

• Non-plural table names

• Had to remove primary id’s on join tables

• Non-plural table names

• Had to remove primary id’s on join tables

• Needed a way to delete cached templates on db update

How long did this take?

1 week / 2 - 3 hours per day

The End

0

1,500

3,000

4,500

6,000

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

New Theaters

0

12,500

25,000

37,500

50,000

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

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