It’s live! This has been a while coming (for us devs at least) but finally it’s here! Check it out at www.attwilliams.com, or read on for some more technical jargon.
The backend of the site is Ruby on Rails, running a MySQL database. The press-only site is an xhtml affair powered by rails, whereas the public consumer site has a flash front end fed via RSS feeds from the backend.
Why not use Flash remoting? This was considered at the start, but on the launch of the first portion of the site, the servers had to deal with 16,000 hits an hour for the first 72hours, and flash remoting would criple even a reasonably large cluster. Using RSS lets us generate the files when new content is added, and cache them so they only need to be server by a web server. Pretty neat.
I’m pretty proud of this, it’s been hard work and involved some late nights, but the end result has been worth it. Well done to all the team! They’re all chugging beers, but I’ve got to race later on, so I’m sticking to tea for the moment.
I’ll have more to say technically in the coming weeks, and we have some other features that will be added in the near future, some very interesting from a rails aspect.
Credits
- Justin Fanning
- Radha Stirling
- Max Haggenmiller
- Eddie Bosticco
- Jason Griffiths
- Shaun Laughey
- Michael Christenson II
- Myself
- Nicholas Wright (Blog post)
- Kyle Drake
- PJ Cabrera
- Steven Holloway
- Brad Bollenbach
- Tim Cooper
- Matt Folkard
- Ben Millar
