RailsConf 2010: Spree and The Ecommerce Smackdown, Or Not
By Steph Skardal
June 9, 2010
Spree has made a good showing at RailsConf 2010 so far this year, new site and logo released this week:
It started off in yesterday’s Ecommerce Panel with Sean Schofield, a former End Point employee and technical lead on Spree; Cody Fauser, the CTO of Shopify and technical lead of ActiveMerchant; Nathaniel Talbott, co-founder of Spreedly; and Michael Bryzek, the CTO and founder of Gilt Groupe.
The panel gave a nice overview on a few standard ecommerce questions:
- My client needs a store—what technology should I use? Why shouldn’t I just reinvent the wheel? The SaaS reps evangelized their technologies well, explaining that a hosted solution is good as a relatively immediate solution that has minimum cost and risk to a business. A client [of SaaS] need not be concerned with infrastructure or transaction management initially, and a hosted solution comes with freebies like the use of a CDN that improve performance. A hosted solution is a good option to get the product out and make money upfront. Also, both SaaS options offer elegant APIs.
- How do you address client concerns with security? Again, the SaaS guys stressed that there are a few mistakes guaranteed to kill your business and …
conference ecommerce ruby rails spree
RailsConf 2010 Rate a Rails Application: Day One, Session One
By Steph Skardal
June 8, 2010
My first session at RailsConf 2010 was one that I found valuable: 12 hours to Rate a Rails Application presented by Elise Huard. Elise discussed the process of picking up a Rails application and analyzing it, rather than being the developer who develops a Rails application from scratch. This is particularly valuable because I’ve had to dive into and comprehend Rails projects more in the last few months. I’d imagine this will become more common as Rails matures and legacy code piles up. Elise mentioned that her motivation for application review comes from either acquisition or for project maintenance. Below is the 12-hour timeline covered by Elise:
0:00: Team Overview
First, Elise suggests that speaking to a team will reveal much about the application you are about to jump into. In our case at End Point, we often make up part of or all of the development team. She briefly mentioned some essential personality traits to look for:
- control freak: someone who worries about details and makes other people pay attention to details
- innovator: someone who looks for the next exciting things and doesn’t hesitate to jump in
- automator: people who care about process, more sys admin side of things …
conference ecommerce ruby rails spree
Spree vs Magento: A Feature List Comparison
By Steph Skardal
June 7, 2010
Note: This article was written in June of 2010. Since then, there have been several updates to Spree. Check out the current Official Spree Extensions or review a list of all the Spree Extensions.
This week, a client asked me for a list of Spree features both in the core and in available extensions. I decided that this might be a good time to look through Spree and provide a comprehensive look at features included in Spree core and extensions and use Magento as a basis for comparison. I’ve divided these features into meaningful broader groups that will hopefully ease the pain of comprehending an extremely long list :) Note that the Magento feature list is based on their documentation. Also note that the Spree features listed here are based on recent 0.10.* releases of Spree.
Features on a Single Product or Group of Product
| Feature | Spree | Magento |
| Product reviews and/or ratings | Y, extension | Y |
| Product qna | N | N |
| Product seo (url, title, meta data control) | N | Y |
| Advanced/flexible taxonomy | Y, core | Y |
| Seo for taxonomy pages | N | Y |
| Configurable product search | Y, core | Y |
| Bundled products for discount | Y, extension | Y |
| Recently viewed products | Y, extension | Y |
| Soft product support/downloads | Y, extension | Y, I think so |
| Product … |
ecommerce ruby rails spree cms magento
Tracking Down Database Corruption With psql
By Josh Williams
June 1, 2010
I love broken Postgres. Really. Well, not nearly as much as I love the usual working Postgres, but it’s still a fantastic learning opportunity. A crash can expose a slice of the inner workings you wouldn’t normally see in any typical case. And, assuming you have the resources to poke at it, that can provide some valuable insight without lots and lots of studying internals (still on my TODO list.)
As a member of the PostgreSQL support team at End Point a number of diverse situations tend to cross my desk. So imagine my excitement when I get an email containing a bit of log output that would normally make a DBA tremble in fear:
LOG: server process (PID 10023) was terminated by signal 11
LOG: terminating any other active server processes
FATAL: the database system is in recovery mode
LOG: all server processes terminated; reinitializing
Oops, signal 11 is SIGSEGV, Segmentation Fault. Really not supposed to happen, especially in day to day activities. That’ll cause Postgres to drop all of its current sessions and restart itself, as the log lines indicate. That crash was in response to a specific query their application was running, which essentially runs a process on a column across …
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The PGCon “Hall Track”
By Josh Tolley
May 25, 2010
One of my favorite parts of PGCon is always the “hall track”, a general term for the sideline discussions and brainstorming sessions that happen over dinner, between sessions (or sometimes during sessions), and pretty much everywhere else during the conference. This year’s hall track topics seemed to be set by the developers’ meeting; everywhere I went, someone was talking about hooks for external security modules, MERGE, predicate locking, extension packaging and distribution, or exposing transaction order for replication. Other developers’ pet projects that didn’t appear in the meeting showed up occasionally, including unlogged tables and range types. Even more than, for instance, the wiki pages describing the things people plan to work on, these interstitial discussions demonstrate the vibrancy of the community and give a good idea just how active our development really is.
This year I shared rooms with Robert Haas, so I got a good overview of his plans for global temporary and unlogged tables. I spent a while with Jeff Davis looking through the code for exclusion constraints and deciding whether it was realistically possible to cause a starvation problem with many concurrent …
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Postgres Conference — PGCon2010 — Day Two
By Greg Sabino Mullane
May 24, 2010
Day two of the PostgreSQL Conference started a little later than the previous day in obvious recognition of the fact that many people were up very, very late the night before. (Technically, this is day four, as the first two days consisted of tutorials; this was the second day of “talks”.)
The first talk I went to was PgMQ: Embedding messaging in PostgreSQL by Chris Bohn. It was well attended, although there were definitely a lot of late-comers and bleary eyes. A tough slot to fill! Chris is from Etsy.com and I’ve worked with him there, although I had no interaction with the PgMQ project, which looks pretty cool. From the talk description:
PgMQ (PostgreSQL Message Queueing) is an add-on that embeds a messaging client inside PostgreSQL. It supports the AMQP, STOMP and OpenWire messaging protocols, meaning that it can work with all of the major messaging systems such as ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ. PgMQ enables two replication capabilities: “Eventually Consistent” Replication and sharding.
As near as I can tell, “eventually consistent” is the same as “asynchronous replication”: the slave won’t be the same as the master right away, but will be eventually. As with Bucardo and Slony, the …
community conference database open-source postgres bucardo replication
Spree and Multi-site Architecture for Ecommerce
By Steph Skardal
May 24, 2010
Running multiple stores from a single ecommerce platform instance seems to be quite popular these days. End Point has worked with several clients in developing a multi-store architecture running from one Interchange installation. In the case of our work with Backcountry.com, the data structure requires that a site_id column be included in product and navigation tables to specify which stores products and categories belong to. Frontend views are generated and “partial views” or “view components” are organized into a per-site directory structure and database calls request products against the current site_id. Below is a simplified view of the data structure used for Backcountry.com’s multi-site architecture.
Basic multi-store data architecture
A similar data model was implemented and enhanced for another client, College District. A site_id column exists in multiple tables including the products and navigation tables, and sites can only access data in the current site schema. College District takes one step further in development for appearance management by storing CSS values in the database and enabling CSS stylesheet generation on the fly with the stored CSS settings. This …
ecommerce ruby rails spree
PostgreSQL Conference - PGCon 2010 - Day One
By Greg Sabino Mullane
May 21, 2010
The first day of talks for PGCon 2010 is now over, here’s a recap of the parts that I attended.
On Wednesday, the developer’s meeting took place. It was basically 20 of us gathered around a long conference table, with Dave Page keeping us to a strict schedule. While there were a few side conversations and contentious issues, overall we covered an amazing amount of things in a short period of time, and actually made action items out of almost all of them. My favorite decision we made was to finally move to git, something myself and others have been championing for years. The other most interesting parts for me were the discussion of what features we will try to focus on for 9.1 (it’s an ambitious list, no doubt), and DDL triggers! It sounds like Jan Wieck has already given this a lot of thought, so I’m looking forward to working with him in implementing these triggers (or at least
nagging him about it if he slows down). These triggers will be immensely useful to replication systems like Bucardo and Slony, which implement DDL replication in a very manual and unsatisfactory way. These triggers will not be like the current triggers, in that they will not be directly attached to …
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