Adam Keys is Thinking

I promised you the details on how we built Tag Better, so here we go. This is what I used to build the back-end bits. You’ll have to pester Chris or Alex to get the front-end details.

h2. Sinatra

Technically, it’s a Rails Rumble. Read between the lines of the rules and you’ll see it’s really a Rack Rumble. And so I went with my favorite for prototyping, Sinatra.

Happily, Sinatra had my back the whole time. I never came across anything that stumped me. Further, I didn’t pay any taxes for ceremony I don’t need.

Verdict: perfect tool for the job.

h2. Passenger

I hadn’t used Passenger much before this weekend. I’m pretty happy spooling up app processes in a terminal and watching the logs scroll past. localhost:3000 is my friend.

However, I’m an outlier in this regard. My teammates aren’t as interested in lower-level bits as I am, so I figured that using Passenger is the best bet to help them get the app up and running locally.

The benefit that I didn’t realize we’d get from this is running the same stack locally as on the production server. Besides some virtual host wrangling that Passenger Pane saved me from locally, getting the app up and running was painless.

Verdict: I am quite likely to keep tolerate Apache for that Passenger goodness, especially when I am the operations guy.

h2. Sprinkle + passenger_stack

The moment that I realized we’d have to set up our own server instance was one of brief, abject terror. I knew this could easily expand to fill a lot more of my time than I wanted. Luckily, I was wrong.

Ben Schwartz’s passenger_stack helped me get our Linode slice up far faster than I would have been able to by hand. I cloned his repo, tweaked it to our needs (disabled MySQL, eventually added a CouchDB recipe) and ran it on our server. Several minutes later, we had a working server. Pretty awesome.

passenger_stack uses Sprinkle, which isn’t getting as much play in the server configuration space as Puppet and Chef. Sprinkle does seem really well suited to standing up apps on a few servers. We might want to step up to something heftier once we had more servers, but Sprinkle and passenger_stack are simple to understand and don’t require any supporting infrastructure to use.

Verdict: Not too primitive, not too involved; just right.

h2. CouchDB

When I’m building any app that relies on an API as its primary data source, caching API response data is forefront on my mind. Serving the data locally, rather than making a request every time, means the app feels more responsive. An added benefit is not upsetting the upstream data provider.

I’ve built apps like this that use MySQL as a cache and it just never felt right. I’ve been tinkering with CouchDB and Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant lately. I decided to go with CouchDB for this one because of the excellent CouchDBX, which makes it easier for those who don’t even know what Erlang is to use CouchDB.

CouchDB ended up working pretty well. While we haven’t really leaned into it, it didn’t present any challenges while I was developing. Using CouchRest with Sinatra worked just fine.

Verdict: It just worked, which is exactly what I needed.

h2. Skipping traditional TDD

OK, so maybe only Jared Diamond would consider this a technology. But skipping the writing of tests to drive my design was pretty helpful. Consider Kent Beck’s flight metaphor. Doing a Rails Rumble is just like the taxi-ing phase. Or a minimum valuable product. Either way, you want to make a small investment towards validating an idea.

Notice I said traditional TDD. To tell the truth, I did write a sniff test script after I had the basic app working. But it wasn’t an xUnit-style test. It’s just a shell script that bangs on the app with fixed parameters. I do have to manually inspect it to make sure nothing is blowing up. What I’m really automating here is the pain of typing out Curl commands.

Verdict: worked great for the original purposes, but I’ll probably add a proper test suite as one of the first post-contest enhancements

So that’s what I think helped make our project go off pretty well. Really, what they did was help me get stuff done and then get out of the way. Isn’t that the best kind of tool?